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RIOTOUS ASSEMBLIES
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Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England ADRIAN RANDALL
1
3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © A. J. Randall 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Kings Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–925990–9
978–0–19–925990–8
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Ordered, Nemine contradicente, That leave be given to bring in a Bill for preventing Tumult and riotous Assemblies; and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the Rioters. Journal of the House of Commons, 1 July 1715
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Preface Embarking upon a project like this in the age of ‘Research Assessment Exercises’ might be regarded by the prudent either as wilful self-indulgence or as reckless folly. ‘But it will only count as one’, Directors of Research might legitimately wail. ‘With that number of words, you might have produced all four items.’¹ Having myself been engaged in the academic ‘management’ business for ten out of the past fifteen years, this is a view with which I have some sympathy. I am very grateful, therefore, to Chris Wickham who, charged with cracking the whip, has resolutely encouraged me forward and refrained from making nasty noises as the book’s completion slipped ever back. He has, moreover, offered trenchant and informed criticism, all of which has been gratefully received. John Breuilly, who, as Head of Department, suggested in a staff development review five or more years ago that I write such a book, might have been having second thoughts had he not departed for pastures new, but I owe him a debt of thanks for the encouragement to start. The Arts and Humanities Research Board, as they then were, provided me the extended study leave to ‘complete’ the project and were remarkably understanding when protracted illness delayed the typescript’s first submission to Oxford University Press. In my defence I might argue that completion has been hindered by the myriad demands on my time as a Dean. In some respects that role has many echoes of an eighteenth-century justice: a deal of time is taken up with the higher education equivalent of poor law disputes, apprenticeship, and custody cases. I have not, though, been called upon to quell a riot, at least not as yet. However, it must be confessed, I am notoriously slow to finish anything that fits the category ‘research outputs’. I have a fondness for ‘thick description’, believing that one cannot satisfactorily establish a case unless one explains the full context. And the longer I take, the more I tend to find out and therefore want to investigate further. Since this is just the kind of excuse no longer tolerated among the journeymen in the workshops of academe, it is perhaps a good job that, like Squire Weston and his penchant for swearing, I have taken out my ‘dedimus’ and secured my seat on the bench, if only for a period. This book has had two ‘readers’ in mind who, sadly, will never read it. My father, Frederick, read everything I had written with care and critically, in the nicest sense of the word. His neighbour for nearly fifty years, Joe Drewett, read, in his own words, ‘the interesting bits’. They were both ordinary working men, born ¹ Readers outside the UK should understand that the Research Assessment Exercise is the modern academic equivalent of the excise, and every citizen wishing to retain his or her citizenship must provide four items for evaluation to the commissioners on a regular basis.
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in the second decade of the twentieth century. Both left school without formal qualifications and took up trades, respectively as a leather glover and as a painter and decorator. Both served in the desert war and, in my father’s case, in the Italian campaign too. Both were self-educated, private family men who did good where they could and who left big holes when they died. I have always been conscious of trying to write in a manner and form which they would find accessible and (if only in part, Joe) ‘interesting’. But I have also been mindful that men such as these were the actors in the dramas that I have been studying: real people with real craft skills earned in apprenticeships, facing real difficulties and expressing genuine outrage when the rich and privileged were allowed to ride roughshod over the rights and fortunes of those less fortunate than themselves. Others, too, have been there in my head as exemplars. My mother, Marjory, was always ‘about’ to read my work but other tasks always proved more pressing. She had a real gift for teaching, something that I like to think I have inherited from her. Her mother, my grandmother, would have felt that this sort of book was ‘not for the likes’ of her. Both, though, offer inspiration. My mother, a grammar school girl who left her office job when she married, had to go out and find work, as an unqualified infants teacher, when my father was diagnosed in 1957 with terminal cancer—he was very stubborn, dying in his eighty-sixth year, confounding and outlasting all of his specialists—in order to keep the house about our head. She continued to do so in the successive medical crises that followed. Elsie, her mother, was a pocket dynamo who in her youth had formed a trade union of the girls who sewed up the leather gloves that men like my father cut. She was blacklisted for her troubles. My maternal grandfather epitomized another model. From blacking boots at Marlborough College, he ran away and joined the railway. He could remember the general strike and the local trade union leader urging the men to ‘smash the ca-pit-alists’, a sentiment that changed abruptly when this particular champion of the people was shrewdly offered a management post. In a strongly unionized industry, my grandfather had a healthy scepticism of those who claimed to speak for the workers. My paternal grandfather seemed to my sister and I a very grumpy man. As children we could not understand, so many years later, the trauma that had affected him as a stretcher-bearer in the fields of Flanders in the Great War and thereafter shaped his life. He was not at all like his wife, our grandmother who was unfailingly kind, if rather more so to my sister—she had raised five sons and one grandson and felt that boys needed to be ‘checked’.They have all continued to remind me that men and women in the past were, like them, whole and rounded, managing as best they could, keeping their heads down and looking after their families unless or until they found themselves confronted by something that coerced or roused them into action. Many people have helped, witting and unwitting, in the completion of this book. In particular I would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Andy Charlesworth, David Walsh, and Richard Sheldon with whom I worked on a most harmonious project investigating ‘social protest and community change in
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the West of England’, rather more years ago than I care to remember. Our discussions then opened up a series of new insights, not all of which we managed in the time to bring to fruition. Readers will recognize that a deal of my examples in this book are drawn from the West Country, many coming from that very project. I must gratefully acknowledge the support of the ESRC for their support of that research. Particular thanks must go to my long-time friend and colleague, Leonard Schwarz. He has always been generous in his support and kindly in his criticisms. He has forgotten more about the eighteenth century than I will ever know. Both he and I benefited from the avuncular scholarship and support early in our careers of John Harris, whose understanding of eighteenth-century industry was second to none. His is a much-missed presence. I have been fortunate to be able to learn from luminaries who have made their own distinctive contributions to the study of popular protest. In particular it will be apparent the intellectual debts that I owe to John Bohstedt, Douglas Hay, Jeanette Neeson, Nicholas Rogers, David Rollison, John Rule, James Scott, and Roger Wells. Their work on this period has never ceased to be innovative and illuminating. I have also learned much from correspondence with Kevin Binfield, whose recent work has opened up a new way of approaching Luddism. I am grateful to my colleague Peter M. Jones and to Michael Martin who have both flagged up material to me. I also thank the numerous undergraduate dissertation and postgraduate research students who over the years, knowing of my interests, have passed me references and examples of popular protests. In particular, I have learned much from Richard Sheldon, whose work on the politics of food in the eighteenth century is keenly awaited, from Sarah Price on early nineteenth-century Lancashire, and from Karly Walters on governmental responses to Luddism. Above all, I must, in common with anyone who has studied popular protest in the long eighteenth century, acknowledge the immense debt that I owe to Edward Thompson. No encomium of mine can do justice to the profound impact that his work, rich in scholarship and detailed understanding of his subject, has had on subsequent comprehension of the relationships between authorities and peoples in the Hanoverian age. Put simply, he transformed the way in which we look at the subject. As a young postgraduate, I had the temerity to send him some early drafts of my work. He was a severe taskmaster, but, though fierce in debate, he was also the kindest of men, always willing to share sources, to debate, and in his word, to ‘reason’. He was, and remains long after his untimely death, an inspirational figure. To paraphrase Newton, in so far as any of us have seen farther, it was only because we have stood on the shoulders of a giant. Successive editors at OUP have been extraordinarily tolerant and supportive of my frequent postponements of delivery dates and I hereby thank them all. I also express my appreciation to the unnamed referees who have looked over the drafts of this book and offered constructive and pertinent criticism, much of which I have been happy to incorporate in this final draft. The faults that are left are mine.
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The reader will notice that, alongside the West Country, examples from Staffordshire feature a deal in the following pages. Two reasons explain that. The first is that I live in the county, the second, far more significant, is that I am blessed with a close relationship with the County Archivist. Thea Randall has provided me with references, suggestions, support, and unfailing encouragement throughout the production of this volume, and for long before. Our household has been for the past three years overwhelmed with the production of this book and her Stakhanovite efforts to secure over £2m to purchase, intact and for continued public enjoyment and use, the largest single deposited archival collection in the County Record Office. In an age where public service continues to be treated either as an experimental laboratory for new models of social management or as a burden on the taxpayers, and often as both, historians need to recognize the fragility of our written heritage, not as in the past from mould or acid, but from the commodification of archives. The aristocrats and gentry who ruled this little island created archives without any thought to their historical usage and piled them up in trunks and boxes in estate offices. Their successors in the post-war years deposited them into record offices both to relieve pressure on space and because they came to realize that these records contained material of pertinence to the wider history of this land, and indeed, from the age of empire, of other lands. For fifty years or more we have been able to study them, freely and openly, properly listed and catalogued, cleaned up, perfectly preserved and conserved by dedicated archivists, all at public expense. Vigilance and political action is now needed if we are to ensure that this record of our past continues to be available. We have lost much of our manufacturing base in the past three decades: we cannot allow our written heritage to go the same way. As I have struggled through the constant round of academic quarter sessions, petty sessions, and Brewster sessions and Thea has struggled with the complexities of Heritage Lottery applications, we have been sustained by two furry friends. Brinkley is sadly no longer with us, so we do not now wake to find a dead mouse on the bed and a snoring giant pinioning our feet. Strangely, you may feel, we miss his huge presence hugely. Tilly, the petite Elizabeth Bennet to his Mr Darcy, continues to delight us, as Mr Bennet might have said. She has never shown any interest in history, unlike her late great aunts, but appreciates my occasional ‘research day’ at home. She is probably the only one who will not be pleased that it is finished. This book is dedicated to Thea, to Tilly, and to Thomas Helliker, of whom more anon. Little Haywood, December 2005
Contents 1. Reading the Riot
1
2. Power, Authority, and the Riot Act
20
3. Protesting People
44
4. Food, Market Custom, and Protest
69
5. Setting the Price: Food Riots before 1790
91
6. Industrial Protest, Custom, and Law
122
7. Country People: Popular Protest in the English Countryside
152
8. Nobs and Mobs: Political Disorders
179
9. The Repudiation of the Moral Economy
209
10. Before the Luddites: Machinery, Regulation, and the State
240
11. ‘Engines of Mischief ’: The Luddite Disturbances of 1811–12
271
12. Riotous Assemblies
303
Bibliography Index
332 345
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1 Reading the Riot Riots were endemic in eighteenth-century England. Benjamin Franklin, working as a printer in London in 1769, recorded, I have seen within a year riots in the country about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coalheavers; riots of sawyers; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of smugglers, in which custom-house officers and excisemen have been murdered, the King’s armed vessels and troops fired at.¹
The later 1760s were particularly riotous but Franklin’s list was far from exhaustive and his experience far from unique. This prevalence of popular disorder in the country amazed and shocked many foreign visitors, as did the apparent insouciance with which the country’s elite faced it.² Why were riots and social protests so frequent in eighteenth-century England and what do they tell us about the conditions, attitudes, and motivation of those involved and of the nature of eighteenth-century English society? Until the 1960s historians tended to regard riots and other forms of popular protest in eighteenth-century England as unworthy of serious attention. They were seen either as simple emanations of economic distress or as the work of the ‘hired mob’. There was some justification for such a view. As contemporaries recognized, adverse economic circumstances, such as depressions, wars, wage cuts, and rapid rises in the cost of living increased the risk of disorder, since the daily lives of the great majority of eighteenth-century Englishmen and women were carried on against a backcloth of mounting economic insecurity within a rapidly developing capitalist market system. The process of ‘proto-industrialization’, significantly accelerating economic growth, was transforming economic relations long before the ‘Industrial Revolution’ of machine-led growth occurred.³ This ¹ A. H. Smyth (ed.), The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1907), x. 239, cited in I. Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution (Pimlico, 1992), 15. ² For example, Jeremy Black, Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Macmillan, 1990), 25, notes that men like the Comte de Cambis, French ambassador 1737–40, were ‘amazed at the extent to which popular disturbances in Britain were not punished and law and order were flouted’. ³ For a recent overview of the debate on ‘proto-industrialization’, a concept originated by F. F. Mendels (‘The Proto-industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism’, Social History, 3 (1976)), see S. King and G. Timmins, Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 2001), 38–49.
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economic growth brought with it both benefits and dangers. Even at the start of the Hanoverian reign, England had a far higher percentage of population divorced from the land than in any other Western European society. In consequence, most people lacked the means to provide their own subsistence and depended upon a labour market for cash to purchase their daily bread. Growth in the market for manufactures therefore provided increased opportunities. However, work, even for the skilled artisan, was subject to rapid fluctuation. Fashion, an increasingly important determinant of trade in the eighteenth century, might alter with surprising speed. International markets, on which large areas of production in textiles and metal goods depended, might suddenly contract as a result of changing government policy or the hostile actions of competitors. Domestic markets likewise were subject to sudden expansion and contraction, with the state of the harvest remaining the critical determinant of economic stability. War, in which the country was engaged for more than one in every three years of the eighteenth century, disrupted the economy and imposed heavy demands on manpower, boosting employment in certain industries while undermining it in others. Major improvements in transport changed the very structure of internal marketing, most particularly that of grain, substantially realigning the old relationship between local production and consumption. Labour of all sorts, therefore, inhabited a world characterized by insecurity. That insecurity was also felt, if less forcefully, by many of the middling sort, who made up the most rapidly growing consumer group in society, and by the lesser gentry. Although these classes were rarely (though, as we shall see, occasionally) involved in violent protest, they too had their own weapons to bring to bear in time of hardship and economic difficulty. In short, eighteenth-century Hanoverian England was a time of considerable economic change and growing stress. However, economic insecurity does not explain ‘riot’. It merely provided a context in which protest was more likely to occur. Protest in fact was far from certain or predictable. It was also a time of political change and tension. Although the Hanoverian dynasty eventually established itself securely in power and authority, this was not a rapid process. If the majority of Englishmen and women had little time for the Stuarts, they saw little to identify with in a German King who spoke no English and who maintained a phalanx of foreign troops, and three foreign mistresses, about him. Moreover, the new regime in 1714 was immediately beset with internal disorder and external threats of invasion. Within a year of George I’s accession, the country was threatened with invasion by the mobilized supporters of the Old Pretender, while rebellion had broken out in Northumberland. Though the ‘Fifteen’ proved remarkably easy to overpower, the threat from Jacobites in Scotland simmered on until the rising of 1745, when the invaders reached as far as Derby before pulling back, just at the point when London was apparently wide open to assault. The brutal suppression of Scotland that followed, led by the King’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, did little to endear the ‘Butcher of Cullodden’ or his family to English hearts. And from 1714 until 1815 there
Reading the Riot
3
remained a continual fear of invasion from France, the ancient enemy, which for most of the century constituted the major military power in Europe. Within the country, the aristocratic Whigs established themselves firmly in power, leaving the Tories to grumble from the provinces. But the Whigs’ grip on power was never absolute. The vagaries of the ‘British’ state with its emphasis upon maximizing autonomy for the counties and minimizing the authority of the centre always created tensions within the body politick. Political ‘mobs’ could certainly be bought, as anyone attending a disputed election hustings could see. But if some of those involved in political disorders were undoubtedly ‘hired’, ‘high’ politics at other times could touch chords in the wider populace, engaging their immediate attention and intervention. Political life in Hanoverian England provided a ripe context for disorder. Yet, again, there was nothing predictable or inevitable about political rioting. So what did lead ordinary people to riot? This is a question that has engaged historians since the 1960s, thanks in particular to two men who pioneered the study of ‘history from below’ for this period, George Rudé and Edward Thompson. Rudé’s approach to the ‘crowd in history’ was developed first in his studies of the Parisian crowd in the Revolution and then extended to a study of eighteenth-century disturbances in London. Rudé’s approach was strongly influenced by the work of the French social historian Georges Lefebvre, who was the first to insist upon seeing the revolutionary crowd not as a homogeneous ‘mob’ but made up of individuals, each of whom had rational reasons for involvement. His method, focused upon locating ‘faces in the crowd’, was adopted by Rudé.⁴ Rudé’s detailed and meticulous examination of police records (in France) and prosecution evidence (in England) emphasized the ‘ordinariness’ of those involved in popular protest. Even in the Gordon riots of 1780, he argued, those involved in disturbances were far from being the ‘dregs’ of society but men and women, usually of settled abode and trade, who had been prompted to action by strongly held values or pressing economic need. To Rudé the crowd was primarily a political animal, informed by ideas of justice and liberty and held together by shared values and experiences. It was a ‘“face-to-face” or “direct contact group”’ rather than any sort of cultural phenomenon, an ‘ “aggressive mob” ’ that asserted popular opinion.⁵ However, while this approach enabled a clearer focus upon the motivations of the participants than formerly, it also tended to compartmentalize protest forms. Rudé deliberately excluded all forms of popular protest that lacked an overtly political dimension. Moreover, his Marxist perspective led him to privilege events that seemed to indicate a developing class, even revolutionary, identity. Forms of protest that did not exhibit such characteristics were downgraded or ignored. In this respect, his work has been severely criticized by the leading ⁴ G. Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From its Origins to 1793 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). ⁵ G. Rudé, The Crowd in History (Lawrence and Wishart, 1964, 1981 edn.), 3, 4. See also G. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution and Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1965 and 1962).
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historian of eighteenth-century political disturbances, Nicholas Rogers, whose own work has shown that, while clear and determined political values underpinned the understanding of the political crowd, these cannot be seen as betokening a clear class identity. Rather, they indicated a sophisticated understanding of contemporary politics.⁶ In contrast, Edward Thompson’s approach, though remaining like Rudé’s within a Marxist analysis, was significantly more subtle. His path-breaking work concentrated upon eighteenth-century food riots, but he placed these within a wider value system and within a wider context of political negotiation and contested hegemony. Like Rudé, Thompson rejected the ‘economistic’ explanation that saw rioting, and especially food rioting, that most frequent form of popular protest in the eighteenth century, as the consequence simply of ‘hunger’ or distress. For Thompson, the various actors in these conflicts were not simply responding to economic stimuli but were informed by a clear and sustaining value system, what he termed the ‘moral economy’ of the English crowd, which insisted that the customary ‘rights’ of the community might not be set aside to further the selfish individualistic aspirations and profits of the few. Thompson saw such protest, in short, as being informed by an ideological confrontation between the proponents of a new and aggressive market model of society and an older more diffuse model of socio-political relations that set a premium upon custom and stability.⁷ The model of the moral economy has proved exceptionally fecund. As an explanatory tool it has been utilized by historians not only of British food riots but also of those in France, America, India, and China, while others have taken up the concept and applied it to industrial conflicts, to political conflicts, and to explain modes of popular action in peasant economies of the third world.⁸ However, criticisms of Thompson’s model have also been plentiful. Economic historians believed that Thompson’s concept reflected an ignorance of the economic dynamics of the era, while old Marxist critics feared that Thompson’s ‘cultural Marxism’ marked a retreat from the ‘true belief ’ in the inevitability of class struggle. Historians in recent years have variously criticized Thompson’s failure to take adequate account of the importance of the middling sort within his model; argued that he ignored the role of women in disturbances; and assumed too easily both that the state was all-powerful and that the legal system of ‘terror’ was both effective and class-driven. He has also been accused of neglecting the importance ⁶ N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 10–11. ⁷ Thompson’s approach can be seen developing in his accounts of eighteenth-century popular protest in his monumental study, The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz, 1963; Penguin, 1968), but reached its clearest expression in his ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, l (1971), 76–136. The ‘Moral Economy’ paper was republished in his later collection, Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991), which also included an extended response to his critics, ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, chs. 4 and 5. ⁸ For an evaluation of the importance of the model, see A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest (Macmillan, 2000), ch. 1.
Reading the Riot
5
of religion, and, by constructing his model of the moral economy within an essentially rural society, of failing to recognize the very different world of the town in eighteenth-century England.⁹ The chapters that follow will take up some of these criticisms, but it is worthwhile dwelling briefly on the last, given the fact that, when we map popular protests in the century, it is clear that disorders were experienced in both rural and urban settings. There clearly were real differences between the eighteenth-century rural and urban worlds, a view that has informed a great deal of the recent writing on eighteenth-century towns. However, we should not exaggerate them. While the inhabitants of the eighteenth-century town were deliberately and consciously developing a new form of ‘polite society’, the inhabitants of the countryside were not culturally static. Certainly there was a much greater density of the ‘middling sort’ in towns, as there always had been. But the economies of town and countryside were far from being polar opposites. In many eighteenth-century villages agriculture and industrial production existed cheek by jowl. Indeed, until mechanization reversed the process in the last quarter of the century, the countryside probably constituted the most rapidly developing location for industrial production, at least in terms of volume. Mining and extractive industries were predominantly located in the countryside, not in towns, though the rapid growth of many Lancashire towns meant that several, such as Bolton or Oldham, housed a large population of miners alongside other ‘industrial’ trades and occupations. Moreover, the eighteenth-century town was often far from the polite and entirely urbanized location that it was to become a century later. Almost all contained within their boundaries open spaces, including commons, such as the Lammas lands in Coventry, and even open fields, on which cattle and other stock grazed. The ease with which highwaymen were able to rob stagecoaches even in the heart of the great cities indicated the fact that open space for their more nefarious purposes was plentiful.¹⁰ These spaces did not disappear rapidly.¹¹ That is not to say that there were no differences. Politically there was a huge difference in the way in which power was transmitted and contested in the great cities of London, Bristol, and Norwich as against the village communities of Cornwall or Derbyshire. Yet some aspects of parish governance remained, paradoxically, stronger in the towns than in the countryside. The vestry in towns such as Manchester or Birmingham had a significance that it had lost in many villages, while the vestries in the large parishes in London were powerful instruments of local government. And the manorial structures of the common fields were ⁹ For an excellent review of the criticisms of Thompson’s approach to the character of society in 18th-century England, see Peter King, ‘Edward Thompson’s Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Studies. The Patriarch–Plebeian Model Re-examined’, Social History, xxi(2) (1996). ¹⁰ For example, highwaymen constituted a real danger to travellers crossing Green Park or Hampstead Heath in London and regularly held up coaches on the way to Vauxhall or Ranelagh pleasure grounds. ¹¹ For example, the township of Oldham, the fastest-growing town in Lancashire in the early 19th century, remained surprisingly small in extent and still contained extensive open spaces.
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tenaciously preserved in boroughs such as Coventry when they had become attenuated in many rural communities by the 1790s. The town was traditionally seen as a place to escape the close social controls assumed to dominate rural life. Yet the ‘open’ villages of the rural world were often every bit as remote from the eyes of the authorities as any urban street or court, as the denizens of such communities as Warminster Common in Wiltshire or Minchinhampton Common on the outskirts of Stroud, and those in authority who had to police them, would happily confirm. The physical proximity of life in towns may in some respects have increased social interaction but their communities were variegated. They did not therefore necessarily share the same common experiences of boom and slump that the inhabitants of lead- or tin-mining villages or textile-making villages and small towns felt. If, therefore, there is one point that needs to be laboured before undertaking a survey such as this, it is that simple rural/urban dichotomies obscure more than they illuminate. Making some sense of popular protest in the eighteenth century necessarily requires some sort of model of social and political relations. Here the criticisms of Thompson’s work, in particular the absence of a leading role for the middling sort, have been strongest and, in many respects, most telling. Thompson’s moral economy thesis predicated popular protest being played out between two poles: on the one side the plebeians, determined to defend customary rights and liberties; on the other, the state, or its local agents, charged with preserving social order. Here was a ‘field of force’ within which social tensions and conflicts were contested. What, critics ask, of the middle classes, who, as employers and forgers of a new ‘civil society’ were intimately concerned with the effects of popular protest? Thompson recognized that, de facto, his model had a third ‘leg’, namely the middling sort. To Thompson, the employers and shopkeepers were certainly involved in the problem: indeed, they too often were the problem, artificially raising prices or lowering wages and thereby disturbing the equilibrium of social relations. Indeed, there is a real sense in which his model resembles the triangular ‘scales of justice’ with the crowd on the one side and the employing and marketing classes on the other, both looking to the magistracy and government at the top of the scale for approval, action, or arbitration. This model characterized the approach taken by one of the earliest historians of food riot to take up and challenge the Thompsonian model, John Bohstedt, in his theory of ‘community politics’. In it, the three groups circle around each other in times of crisis in what Andrew Charlesworth perceptively describes as a ‘stately gavotte’.¹² To some degree such criticism of the moral economy concept as a bipolar one is misdirected, since Thompson’s ‘field of force’ model was essentially about power relations, not social relations. But it is true that Thompson, as he later admitted, ¹² J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Harvard, 1983); A. Charlesworth, ‘From the Moral Economy of Devon to the Political Economy of Manchester, 1790–1812’, Social History, xviii(2) (1993).
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paid scant attention to the role of the middling sort.¹³ Recent research has done much to identify the role of the middling sort. Thus we can now see that they had their own ways of exerting pressure in food markets in time of dearth, while there is a growing recognition that the power of the middling sort over poor relief may well have made them key shapers of the context of protest.¹⁴ For these reasons, Peter King, in a recent and thoughtful review article assessing Thompson’s contribution to eighteenth-century studies, argues for a return to the tripartite model to assist our understanding of protest.¹⁵ This seems at first glance eminently sensible. There were, as we shall see, at least three sets of actors in almost every theatre of riot. However, there are also drawbacks in adopting a tripartite approach, not least because, for some historians, it threatens to slip rather too easily into the dangerous waters of Marxist class analysis. Few historians today would claim to discern anything beyond the earliest stirrings of any sort of ‘class’ consciousness informing the attitudes of rioting crowds in this period. The same might be said of the middling sort, even though recent work has emphasized how the century saw the stirrings of a conscious attempt to develop ‘civil society’.¹⁶ Moreover, if Thompson’s bipolar model stands accused of simplifying the character of social and political relations in the century, the tripartite model likewise might well be seen as falling into the same trap. Indeed, the further one investigates the alignments of social classes in times of conflict during the century, the more fractured the responses seem. The landed classes as a whole certainly identified themselves as a ruling elite, but the interests of the great magnates, who constituted the parliamentary elite, were not necessarily coincident with those of the gentry whose interests remained centred upon the locality and the estate. If politically the divide between gentry and aristocracy tended to diminish as the century passed, economic interests grew if anything wider apart. The stresses of reconciling ‘local’ economic needs and political autonomy with the demands of ‘national’ policy continued to cut in different ways across any clear unity. The middling sort, too, were far from uniform, with the great merchant classes of the cities of London and Bristol having little in common with those who organized industrial production, or with the shopkeepers or professional classes in provincial towns. In these respects, Perkin’s model of the eighteenth century as a finely graded social hierarchy in which status divisions were more marked than economic divisions may still prove more suggestive as a descriptive model of social relations.¹⁷ ¹³ Oral contribution to the conference on ‘The Moral Economy 21 Years On’, held at the University of Birmingham, April 1992. ¹⁴ For two excellent studies of the middling sort in food protests, see S. Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition: Market Management in Bristol, 1709–1815’, and S. Renton, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Middling Sort in the 18th Century: The Case of Norwich in 1766 and 1767’; both in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in EighteenthCentury Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996). ¹⁵ King, ‘Edward Thompson’s Contribution’, 226–7. ¹⁶ See, for example, A. Kidd and D. Nicholls, The Making of the British Middle Class? (Sutton, 1998). ¹⁷ H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), ch. 2.
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It is worth emphasizing, however, that it is not the prime purpose of historians of social protest, Thompson included, to construct, through the matrix of disorder, a comprehensive model to explain all the alignments, nuances, and distinctions of the social order. Rather, their interest is to contextualize protest. The question for this volume is not whether society can be divided into two or three classes but whether we can discern in popular protest an overarching pattern or model that helps to explain and unify our understanding of protest within a wider society. In this, it is the underlying argument of this book that we might do worse than to build upon the foundations of the bipolar model of the moral economy, not least since its explanatory intention was directed not at the social order as a whole but at understanding the causes and ideas that led to disturbance. Interestingly, other historians, coming to the study of eighteenth-century social and political relations from very different directions, have also proposed similar, essentially bipolar, models. This is particularly the case with Dror Wahrman, whose work suggests an interesting revision to the Thompsonian model. From examining the cultural dynamics that underpinned social relations in the century, he concluded, ‘My contention is that there was a profound cultural-political divide in British society in the eighteenth century, and in particular within its elites, between an emerging wide-ranging “national society” and an alternative polymorphous communalprovincial culture.’¹⁸ Warhman recognized the importance of the burgeoning research into the growth of consumerism in the century and in particular of the importance of the middling sort as both consumer and director of social tastes.¹⁹ This rise of the middling sort was seen most clearly in ‘the emergence and maturation of the bourgeoisie in a realm of institutions’. However, Warhman believes that the rapid development of the market economy placed the middling sort at a junction that demanded that they either embrace the rise of a national culture or choose to remain within an essentially ‘local’ society and culture. The choice was ‘to join in and try to become assimilated to some degree in this novel and attractive culture, a culture which was London centred and London-orientated; or to assert their distinctive values and culture, focused upon their local community, against this alien intrusion.’ This dilemma was recognized by Dr Johnson when he bemoaned the impact of the turnpike roads: Formerly there were cheap places and dear places. Now all refuges were destroyed for elegant or genteel poverty, and men had no longer a hope to support them in their struggle through life. The roads moreover caused disunion of families by furnishing a market to each man’s abilities, and destroying the dependence of one man on another.²⁰ ¹⁸ D. Warhman, ‘National Society, Communal Culture: An Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Social History, xvii(1) (1992). ¹⁹ On the rise of consumerism in the 18th century, see in particular N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society (Longman, 1982), and M. Berg, ‘Product Innovation Core Consumer Industries in 18th century Britain’, in M. Berg and K. Bruland (eds.), Technological Revolutions in Europe (Edward Elgar, 1998). ²⁰ Quoted in J. Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (Bristol: William George, 1893), 276.
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The rise of this ‘market to each man’s abilities’, what Warhman terms a ‘national culture’, bifurcated both the middling sort and lesser gentry. Warhman argues, ‘while most aristocrats found themselves naturally (though not irretrievably) on one side of it, and plebeians necessarily on the other side, the gamut of “middling sorts” were divided, between the proponents and followers of the national society, and proponents of the communal-local alternatives.’²¹ Warhman is not alone in seeing a potentially dangerous social bifurcation occurring in the eighteenth century. David Rollison, in a series of provocative and thoughtful in-depth studies of parish life and politics in Gloucestershire in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, sees a similar divide over attitudes and mentalités. He describes this as being a division between on the one hand a ‘patrician society’ and on the other a much older and increasingly decayed ‘local culture’. The essential divergence, he argues, proved to be less on the lines of wealth and class than on cultural characteristics.²² A further historian, who has examined eighteenth-century social relations through the perspective of a groundbreaking national study of the eighteenthcentury bench, Norma Landau, likewise identifies a similar division within the ranks of the justices. She characterizes these two types as, first, the ‘patrician paternalist’, influenced by, and looking towards, the executive in Westminster for a lead and seeing his role as being congruent with the needs of central government, and, second, the ‘patriarchal paternalist’, continuing to look primarily towards the perceived needs of the local community, and defending these when they clashed with the demands of the executive.²³ Bob Bushaway’s engaging exploration of the decline of custom in rural England from 1700 to 1880 likewise postulates an essentially bipolar model, in which the forces of rationalism and capitalist rationalization waged a long-lasting war on what he terms ‘customary society’, those variegated social groups who strove to maintain old customary relations and values.²⁴ I would argue that there are persuasive reasons for utilizing these sorts of bipolar models, in conjunction with Thompson’s original formulation of the moral economy, in examining the character of popular protest in Hanoverian England, given that they can be extended more widely to other forms of protest beyond food riots. We should of course emphasize that the concepts of what may be termed ‘modernism’, a term, incidentally, first used in 1737,²⁵ and of ‘customary society’ were less fully formulated philosophical positions than reactions to a changing world. (That said, as we shall see, each contained within it significant ²¹ Wahrman, ‘National Society’, 2–3. ²² D. Rollison, ‘Property, Ideology and Popular Culture in a Gloucestershire Village, 1660–1740’, Past and Present, xciii (1981). See also his outstanding study, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (Routledge, 1992). ²³ N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace (University of California Press, 1984), 3–4, 360. ²⁴ R. W. Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (Junction Books, 1982). ²⁵ Oxford English Dictionary.
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theoretical underpinnings, which were if anything reinforced as the century progressed.) How men and women reacted to change was clearly influenced by their economic and social status, though this was not necessarily the case or the only case. Then as now, their response was as much an emotional reaction as an economic one. Nor is there real mileage to be obtained in seeking to point out the discrepancies and ambiguities within differing approaches to change, since both ‘sides’ contained any number of each. Thus the leading Whigs, pushed along by the financial interests in the City and the great trading companies, might reasonably be seen, and see themselves, as the leading mentors of ‘modernism’ with their development of the money markets, facilitation of trade, and development of a more modern tax system. Money drove them. Yet they were equally vigorous in upholding the stratified social system and had no intention of allowing ‘modernism’ in terms of developing wider political engagement from the wider populace. Although they were always proud to proclaim the sovereignty of the ‘people’, this was a term that they defined very narrowly. The gentry, often the repository of a ‘customary’ outlook, were often correctly accused of looking down on the mercantile classes, but they, like the aristocracy, were only too happy to raid mercantile society in a search for wealthy heiresses to boost estate income and pay for improvement. Equally, the concept of ‘custom’, central to the mentalité of the artisan and peasant, was far from being immutable. It was less a fixed point than a set of points, some more strongly held than others, in a never-ending contest with employers and greater landlords, a contest in which the line of engagement witnessed ebb and flow according to relative power. The key-linking aspect of both ‘modernism’ and ‘custom’, as value systems or mentalités, was that both claimed moral and historical hegemony. The use of the term ‘moral’ in his ‘moral economy’ led Thompson into all manner of troubles, as he happily admitted. Indeed, he wondered if a better word might be found.²⁶ I think that ‘moral’ is exactly the right word if we recognize the fact that protests, and the value systems that underpinned them, were less about definitive absolutes of behaviour—the moral economy food rioter was no more ‘morally correct’ in seizing food than was the farmer seeking to maximize his profit, as both sides probably recognized in their cups—but about the presentation of argument. Let me suggest how this might best be understood. If, according to Clausewitz, ‘war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means’, we might do worse than to see riot and popular protest as argument continued by other means. In such disorders, as we shall see, there were relatively few occasions in which riot was regarded by the rioters as the complete solution to grievance. It formed part of an ongoing contest of wills and of power. Historians have recognized this and have paid a deal of attention to the argument, again originally identified by Thompson, that we should see riot as a form of ‘theatre’. Studies such as those by John Bohstedt and ²⁶ Thompson, Customs in Common, 271.
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more recently by Nicholas Rogers have demonstrated how the forms of social protest were acted out in public in often entirely conscious forms of orchestrated ‘drama’. They, and others, have alerted us to the extensive use of symbolic forms as ways to convey meanings to the actions and counter-actions of the crowd.²⁷ This is particularly the case in the studies of political disorders. Thus Jacobites waved oak leaves, or brandished turnips, the one symbolizing the future Charles II’s evasion of Cromwellian forces by hiding in the oak tree, the other a crude jest at the Hanoverian monarch’s lack of good looks and ‘German’ diet. In response, Hanoverians would brandish warming pans, allusions to rumours about the paternity of the Pretender. All this is helpful but rather misses the central point: namely, that in presenting symbols, in shouting slogans, and in acting in the ways they did, the crowd were rehearsing and reiterating constructed narratives or ‘stories’. We would do well to remember that in most disputes, opponents ‘tell stories’. These constitute explanations why they have taken up the positions they occupy and why their opponents are wrong in taking up their position. Such stories generally draw upon a partial reading both of history and of current circumstances to legitimate a particular current position. They also represent an attempt at persuasion, if not of opponents then of the impartial and uncommitted. Stories provide the underpinning justification for actions or inactions. In the highest circles, stories, dressed up as ‘precedence’, informed the legal and constitutional status quo. Politically, the oak leaves and warming pans identified stories of history and legitimacy. Stories were, then as now, powerful means of manipulating and mobilizing public opinion and action.²⁸ Stories were all around the inhabitants of the eighteenth century. As in earlier centuries, the oral tradition remained strong, with all sections of society remembering, learning, and adding to the bank of stories that underpinned their histories. Balladeers and itinerant players told stories. Stories were retailed in song and rhyme. But in the eighteenth century this oral tradition was supplemented by new and rapidly growing literary media. This was the century, after all, that saw the invention of the novel as a new form of literature. As printing presses spread around the country, information ephemera such as flysheets and placards proliferated. And above all, the eighteenth century witnessed the development of a medium that was to have a fundamental impact on the political and social relations of the entire country, the newspaper. The rise of the press constituted an information revolution as profound in its importance as the transport revolution and was a key element in the rise of ‘modernity’. In particular it increasingly influenced the ways in which the state ²⁷ Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics; Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics; see also, for a later period, the innovatory work of J. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbolism in England (Oxford, 1994). ²⁸ This can be seen most clearly in the way in which stories of ‘atrocities’ are used to whip up national feeling in times of war.
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could govern. In spreading both the availability and speed of news, newspapers developed an informed public opinion that made it harder for arbitrary government to escape censure. Indeed, together with the riotous crowd, the press was, in the absence of an effective political opposition, one of the few checks upon the power of the Whig oligarchy for much of the century. It was little wonder that the battles concerning the press, in particular over the rights to publish parliamentary debates, proved so bitter. It is worth charting its growth.²⁹ London had developed a stable and thriving press from 1702 but it was the gradual rise of the provincial press in the eighteenth century that really extended public awareness of national governance. Norwich had its first newspaper, the Norwich Post, in 1701, Newcastle upon Tyne, with the Newcastle Courant, from 1711. The Leeds Mercury started in 1720, the Northampton Mercury the following year. In the West Country, Exeter and Bristol, with William Bonny’s Bristol PostBoy, both could boast newspapers in 1704, Shrewsbury in 1705, and Worcester in 1710. Even the market town of Cirencester had a short-lived newspaper in 1716–17. The Gloucester Journal, founded in 1723 by Robert Raikes, a Tory moralist, and William Dicey, may serve as exemplar. By 1736 Raikes had become the sole proprietor and, such was the publication’s success, he was able to purchase a large town house from his earnings. By this date the paper had regular correspondents as far afield as Bristol, Hereford, Salisbury, and Worcester and was being distributed as far as Carmarthen to the west, Taunton to the south, Oxford to the east, and Droitwich to the north.³⁰ Other prominent regional papers were enjoying like progress. The Newcastle Journal listed agents in forty-two towns and villages in the north-east in 1739, the most distant being Berwick in the north and Whitehaven, the other side of the Lake District, to the west. By the early 1760s, when many more provincial papers were competing for an audience, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette had agents in every large midland town from Stafford and Shrewsbury in the north and west to Worcester and Stratford in the south and east, respectively. The Leeds Mercury dominated the West Riding but also sold well into the North Riding and into Lancashire.³¹ These regional papers were supplemented by a growing number of journals, most importantly the Gentleman’s Magazine, which from 1731 provided a combination of book reviews and general interest information together with a survey of news and, at times, quite acerbic comment on issues of national importance. It is hard to estimate sales. Brewer suggests that in the 1720s few provincial papers could hope to sell more than 200–450 copies a week, but growth was steady. By the early 1760s the York Chronicle sold around 2000 copies a week.³² That matched the sales of many ²⁹ The most recent accounts of the development of the press in this period are both by Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); and Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Longman, 2002). ³⁰ Rollison, Local Origins of Modern Society, 221. ³¹ J. Brewer, Party, Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), 145–6. ³² Ibid. 144.
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London papers. But, as historians of the popular press in the early nineteenth century have pointed out, the readership of the press greatly exceeded sales, by at the least a factor of ten. As in the nineteenth century, copies were purchased by inns and often read aloud to wider audiences. In this way newspapers provided information across a social and geographical breadth never previously experienced. In terms of content, the character of the provincial press was much the same. Local ‘news’, dominated by social events, was in all cases heavily padded out with quantities of news simply ‘clipped’ straight from the London press. In this way, news of wars, parliamentary debates, and fiscal information concerning the fledgling stock market all became, by mid-century at the latest, as commonplace to provincial readers as they were to those in the metropolis. ‘High politics’ was thus brought into the daily lives of the literate nation and, through them, a wider public, while, in turn, local opinion might be reflected back to Westminster via the local representatives of political power. Historians of the eighteenth-century provincial press have noted that editors rarely sought to ‘manage’ opinion in direct ways. However, we must remember that the very act of including a story in the paper, and the way in which that story was presented, was itself a source of influence, presenting the audience with information, both direct and inferential, which inevitably shaped their views of life beyond their own parish. The food riots of 1766 offer a good example of this. As in other cases of popular protest, editors were often extremely cautious about publishing information on food riots, since many took the view that it would trigger new outbreaks. Thus, after reporting a riot in Gloucester market in September 1766, the Gloucester Journal carried no further news until late October when it admitted that it had hitherto ‘been unwilling to report’ the extensive riots that had for three weeks swept through the county. This was a clear enough case of a news ‘blackout’. However, the same paper as late as August had carried a story about a farmer ‘between Gloucester and Tewkesbury’ who had fully thirteen wheat ricks left from the previous harvest. He was clearly withholding them in the hope that the price, currently 7s. per bushel, would rise further. The paper warned that ‘if the bounty on export ends and the fine weather continues, he may find he has lost his price.’ Such stories helped to create the widespread belief that there was plenty of grain available and that price rises were entirely the result of market manipulation and speculation, a view sustained by news from London reported in mid-September in the Journal ‘that 2300 gross of corn have been shipped for export this week’. In this way, the Journal shaped both the understanding of the developing crisis of its middling-sort readership and the determination of the poor to resist what they saw as an outrageous abuse of the moral economy of food marketing. While the Journal did not intend to provoke riot, it certainly intended to bring to public notice what it saw as unreasonable behaviour in the food market. In the immediate wake of these disturbances, along with reports of men being rounded up for trial, the paper also carried a lengthy letter from ‘ANON’,
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who asserted that ‘the cries of the poor’ concerning both prices and market practices were only too well founded. For when the day labourer, the artificer or journeyman cannot obtain a sufficient subsistence for themselves and families by a reasonable degree of industry and by husbanding their gains in a prudent manner, they then have cause to complain, and ought to be assisted.
The letter, possibly from the editor himself, noted that it was impossible to augment wages to allow workers to afford the current prices, but that rioting only made the problem of supply worse. It was therefore the duty of ‘all who sympathise with the poor’ to act ‘in the proper manner’ by opening subscriptions to buy up a store of wheat for the needy, ‘to be retailed to the country poor who have the conveniences of grounding their own corn & baking their own bread at 5s. per bushel; and as to the town people who in general do not have such conveniences, it is proposed that rice be sold to them at 1d per pint’. While the letter distinguished the most deserving—‘Firstly and principally those who have refused to join in the present commotion’—it did not exclude those who had been led astray, provided that they returned to ‘their duty’ and were not ‘ringleaders’. In such forms the paper shaped and influenced the ways in which both its direct readership, and then, indirectly, all those who heard about the ‘news’ in the paper, understood the unfolding subsistence crisis in 1766.³³ Stories, therefore, contained both moral discourses and the essential elements to fit within other morality plays. They provided the grist to the mills of moral cosmologies, exemplars for widely divergent ‘truths’ and ‘verities’. Carried by word of mouth, they might transmogrify from ‘hint’ or hypothesis into certainty, from neutral reportage into the sustenance for mass alarm. Fleshed out in flysheets with liberal additions of scurrility and ribaldry, contrary views could be turned into heretical ones and opponents into figures of hatred or fun. And, given the expanding network of news, all this could be promulgated across a wide geography in a matter of days. News did not necessarily shape values. But it provided the means to extend and enlarge, or to narrow, them. Besides, the press was a fecund source not only of ‘new’ stories. It was also the means whereby ‘old’ stories might be reinvented and reinforced, or even completely reinterpreted. Thus the rhetoric of liberty and constitutionalism might be turned, through his adroit use of the press, from its Whig origins into a call for a distinctly radical political change by the likes of John Wilkes, with very dangerous implications for its original progenitors. ‘News’, that is, the reporting of events, therefore might prove the tinder that could cause an otherwise quiescent populace to flare into action. However, it did so only within a wider ‘tinderbox’, where it fitted into the greater ‘stories’ or metanarratives by which each and every group in the eighteenth century understood ³³ Gloucester Journal, 6 October, 25 August, 15 September, 14 October 1766.
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and legitimated its own moral cosmology. The reports in the Gloucester Journal both informed the community of the gathering food crisis (and pointed out the alleged culprits) and also reinforced an essentially paternalist value system of how such problems ought to be resolved. Trying to tease out that moral cosmology is harder in the case of the labouring poor than for the other classes, since they bequeathed the least ‘direct’ evidence to posterity. Rarely do we get to hear the authentic voice of the working man and woman articulating their own understanding of the way the world in which they lived should run. Historians of protest must perforce rely in most cases upon a careful examination of their actions. Protests in this respect offer a privileged ‘window’ through which we may study the ‘body language’ of the rioting crowd and thereby begin to deduce the values that they held. Occasionally we may also catch some phrases, though it is also worth remembering that, when protestors’ words were recorded, this was usually undertaken by hostile agents in order to bring prosecutions later. As will be seen in the rest of this book, teasing out the ‘arguments’ and ‘stories’ of the protesting crowd is far from a straightforward process. However, occasionally an authentic voice carries through time and manages to convey, sometimes surprisingly eloquently, the crowd’s narrative of protest. Let us examine just one, the case of John Beazer, executed at Salisbury in 1738 for riot and destruction of property. Beazer’s testimony also provides us with an example of what it might well have been like for many who just happened to find themselves involved in a riot, or as he put it, caught up in ‘this hurricane’. In November 1738 industrial conflict broke out in Wiltshire when one clothier, Henry Coulthurst, sought both to cut piece rates and to force his weavers to take truck payments in lieu of wages. A large body of weavers from the neighbouring town of Trowbridge, assembled, marched to Melksham and there launched a destructive attack upon Coulthurst’s mill. Beazer, a Melksham journeyman weaver, missed these events, having been ordered by his master to carry his work to a house on the far side of the town. The following morning, however, he went for a walk to see the ruined mill. Suddenly he found himself swept up in a throng as the Trowbridge weavers returned to demand the release of a rioter who had been taken up the previous day. They proceeded to launch a premeditated assault on Coulthurst’s house. Seeing this hurricane, we did not make haste, but stood looking on; and being to and fro among them, I was in and out of the buildings of Mr Coulthurst; and I must confess I did strike at some part of the wainscote, and I think it was a door; but for carrying a hatchet or poult I was no ways guilty thereof, although two oaths were taken against me.
This experience of the ‘hurricane’ that swept up casual spectators and drew them into protests was shared by other workers in similar situations. Beazer was later arrested, singled out because, as a local, he could be recognized. However, he also believed that malice lay behind his identification by ‘the masters of his parish’
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since he had received poor relief. At his trial, Beazer did not claim to be wholly innocent. In common with the more militant Trowbridge weavers, he admitted that he was worried by Coulthurst’s actions and was no doubt glad to lend a hand in the ceremonial punishment meted out to the clothier’s house. However, he insisted that the main fault lay with the duplicitous employers. As he warned them in his confession: Remember you have been guilty of covetousness and oppression. Your advantage had been unspeakable in the measure, whilst we have been from time to time oppressed. . . . Remember this is a truth, that you go perhaps an hundred miles, to merchandise your goods, and have an opportunity to receive your gains; whilst we, poor mechanics, are listening at home to hear good news; but with what sorrows are we filled, when you return, and say with bitter frowns: you cannot afford to give the price you have promised. Then you know that with bitter tears of grief we cry out, it is hard! and you answer, we’ll give you no more! So that through compulsion and distress we are compelled to work at your stinted prices, and go home to our families, and eat morsels so much the smaller.³⁴
Here we can see most eloquently expressed the collision between the expanding market world, or modernism, of the clothier and the essentially parochial and customary world of the weaver. Here too we can hear the authentic voice of the moral economy of the labourer when confronted by the force majeure of the employer. Men and women like John Beazer continued to show their willingness to resist what they saw as oppression throughout the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century. Why and how constitute the focus of this book. In his confession, Beazer referred to the rioters as ‘the mob’. Historians have been, perhaps unduly, fey about using the term, preferring to refer to rioters and protesters as ‘the crowd’. The ‘mob’, it is felt, smacks too much of the ‘hired’ mob, the heavies used at many parliamentary elections to attack political rivals and their supporters and to protect voters pledged to the ‘home’ side, or the ‘brutal’ mob, fuelled by bigotry and drink, which attacked religious opponents, foreigners or those who did not otherwise ‘conform’.³⁵ The term ‘crowd’, on the other hand, carries less pejorative connotations. However, its use by historians such as Rudé and Thompson has been severely criticized by Harrison who argues that ‘the crowd’ was merely an aggregation of people at markets and fairs. They were not preternaturally disposed to riot, but remained, except for odd occasions, orderly and law-abiding.³⁶ This is a fair point. Crowds did not, per se, cause disorder. Although there was a growing fear of the ‘mob’ in the last decade of the century and more especially in the years after 1815, the general lack of concern with which ³⁴ Gloucester Journal, 10 April, 1739. ³⁵ Joseph Priestley, viewing the destruction of his house by a ‘church and King’ mob in Birmingham in 1791, lamented ‘the mad triumph of bigotry’. ³⁶ M. Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge, 1988), part 1. See also the thoughtful discussion in Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, Introduction.
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the rulers of eighteenth-century England viewed large gatherings, as at public hangings or at the hustings, suggests that they were generally confident in their ability to control crowds, a fact quite surprising in view of the paucity of resources available to them should events turn nasty. The point about terminology, however, need not be laboured. Beazer’s use of the term reminds us that the plebeians of eighteenth-century England were both accustomed to being referred to in such a way and not squeamish in using the term about themselves. I shall endeavour to use ‘rioters’ or ‘protestors’ but, if I tend towards using the term ‘crowd’ more often than ‘mob’, it reflects my own concerns to avoid the ‘hired’ connotations that ‘mob’ carries and not any desire to suggest that any large congregation of people constituted a ‘dangerous’ or ‘radical’ threat to the public peace. Crowds were not a threat to the peace. That occurred only when groups were mobilized to protest. Three further introductory points need to be made. The first is the essential defensiveness of popular protest. Riots, with the exception of the hired political mob, were usually reactive responses to perceived worsening of conditions or attacks upon what were seen as rights and liberties. This language of rights and liberties permeates popular protest. It reflected a widely held conviction that the ‘free born Englishman’ had certain clearly defined rights and liberties, most important among them being the right to resist oppression. When indigenous and hard-won liberties were under threat, it was entirely appropriate for the Englishman to resist. This paradigm of the ‘resisting’ Englishman and Englishwoman was not a plebeian construction. The Whigs in the later seventeenth century had argued the right of resistance to unconstitutional power. This view found its most powerful voice in Locke, whose seminal Two Treatises of Government were mostly penned during the Exclusion Crisis and in the years of increased Stuart domination that followed. While his argument, that it was the people’s right to resist, and if necessary overthrow, arbitrary rulers who threatened their liberties, was to prove increasingly embarrassing for the Whigs when they took over the reigns of political power under George I, their busy promulgation of such justifications of their own position to the common people struck root and reinforced a belief in freedoms and rights. As a ‘story’, this proved remarkably enduring. We should not, of course, underestimate the comparative liberties enjoyed by the English citizen at this time. The rights to live, work, and trade where they might, if constrained by institutions such as the poor laws, were real and far ahead of those enjoyed on much of mainland Europe. The right to worship was, if grudgingly, acceded to non-conformists and to Catholics, while the right to vote in parliamentary elections spread to as many as 25% of the adult male population in 1700, though this was soon curtailed when the Hanoverians took over.³⁷ The freedom from arbitrary arrest, safeguarded by Habeas Corpus, the freedom from arbitrary search and interrogation, and the freedom, safeguarded by the jury and the post-1688 independence of the judiciary, from arbitrary justice all underlined the sense of liberty. ‘We were men while you were yet slaves’, the radical artisans of the London Corresponding Society ³⁷ F. O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century (Arnold, 1997), 49.
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in 1793 wrote to the fledgling French Convention, congratulating them on the fact that they had only just enshrined into their new constitution civil liberties that Englishmen of all classes took for granted.³⁸ The Englishman’s, and woman’s, propensity to resist was based upon the fact that they actually enjoyed a quite remarkable liberty. Belief in the right to resist any attack upon popular liberties was widely held. Yet it is clear that some localities were more prone to riot than others. The manufacturing and mining districts of the south-west counties of Cornwall and Devon and the West of England counties of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire, including the Forest of Dean, were prominent ‘riotous communities’ in the first half of the century as were the eastern counties of Suffolk and Essex. The manufacturing districts of the Midland counties of Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and Staffordshire, the eastern midland counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, and the two most rapidly developing industrial counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire all featured increasingly in the second half of the century onwards. The larger cities, Bristol, Norwich, and, to some degree, London were also frequently disturbed by riot. All shared one thing in common: a significant percentage of their labouring poor found their daily bread in manufacture or in mining and transport, in industries that employed large numbers who therefore shared the same economic conditions and similar relationships to the power of industrial capital. Here a common experience of work developed a strong sense of community and a willingness to protest directly when conditions were arbitrarily worsened. This sense of community, enforced as necessary by pressing the reluctant into joining in direct action, generated self-confidence and, in so far as protest produced positive results, a pattern of action and structure of leadership that could easily be invoked in times of distress and conflict. Nonetheless, there was nothing predictable about protest here. Moreover, other localities and other groups that do not fit this paradigm could at times prove surprisingly militant. ‘Country people’ were less inclined to protest than were industrial workers but, as the militia riots of 1757 were to demonstrate, they could prove formidable protestors when roused. Finally, and most importantly, we must remember that riots were the final and not the first line of defence of popular customs and rights. Even the most notoriously militant communities did not respond like Pavlovian dogs to the stimulus of threat and/or distress, or even to deliberate and transparent attacks upon customary rights and practices. They recognized that the consequences of taking direct action might be grave. Such communities, with their rich history of protest, remembered their victories but they also shared a darker memory of having seen their leading sons sent to prison or to dance on the gibbet. They knew well enough that other consequences might flow from challenging the power of local capital or the local authorities too vigorously: they had seen workers ³⁸ Quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1968), 90–1.
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blacklisted and frozen from the job market; they had seen families evicted from their cottages; and they had seen the ways in which the poor law authorities might make life harder for notorious troublemakers. Overt protest was not the first response to hardship and to exploitation and oppression but often the final stage of what we may describe as ‘community micro-politics’ in which different forms of pressure, persuasion, and sanction might long precede direct action. Such forms of negotiation rarely have left a record but, as it will be seen, formed the unseen iceberg to which riots were but the tip. The work of the social anthropologist, James C. Scott, shows clearly that, for the peasant, silent endurance is the most likely response to threatened and actual distress.³⁹ This only makes the willingness of many Englishmen and women openly to resist assaults on their conditions in the eighteenth century the more remarkable. The rest of this book explores these questions. Its structure is as follows. The second chapter, ‘Power, Authority, and the Riot Act’, examines both the legal background to riot and the forces of law and order available to confront protest. The third chapter, ‘Protesting People’, looks at the question of how far the forms of, and legitimation for, plebeian protest drew, inconveniently for the authorities, upon the examples and models established by more ‘respectable’ society. Chapter Four, ‘Food, Market Custom, and Protest’, looks at the ways in which the old ‘paternal’ model of market regulation came under growing pressure from the rise of a ‘national’ market in the eighteenth century and at the forms of protest that this change elicited. The fifth chapter, ‘Setting the Price: Food Riots before 1790’, focuses upon food riots from the Hanoverian accession up to the end of the 1770s. Chapter Six, ‘Industrial Protest, Custom, and Law’, examines industrial protest before the 1790s. Chapter Seven, ‘Country People: Popular Protest in the English Countryside’, looks at a neglected group when ‘riots’ are usually examined, the ‘country people’. The eighth chapter, ‘Nobs and Mobs: Political Disorders’, evaluates the changing character of the political ‘riot’ from the disturbances that greeted George I’s coronation to the Gordon Riots. Chapter Nine, ‘The Repudiation of the Moral Economy’, examines the extensive food riots of 1795–1801 and questions how far they may be seen as marking a sea change in the attitudes of the authorities towards popular protest and of the protestors themselves. Chapter Ten, ‘Before the Luddites: Machinery, Regulation, and the State’, looks at the ways in which machinery began to transform economic relations in the textile industries, generating major problems of disorder and posing serious questions for the old regulatory model of governance. Chapter Eleven, ‘ “Engines of Mischief ”: The Luddite Disturbances of 1811–12’, examines Luddism in the context of earlier industrial protests and asks how far these disorders marked a significant shift in the pattern of popular protest. Finally, Chapter Twelve, ‘Riotous Assemblies’, reviews the changing character of popular protest in the century between 1714 and 1814.
³⁹ J. C. Scott, The Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale, 1985).
2 Power, Authority, and the Riot Act On Saturday 5 March 1737, Prince George, the heir to the throne, and his wife, the Princess of Wales, accompanied by their usual entourage, attended the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Drury Lane was, with Covent Garden, quite the most respectable of the various theatrical venues in the capital, interspersing more ‘popular’ new plays with the works of Shakespeare and the other classics. It was also the largest. Some 900 to 1000 people could be crammed into it, social distinction carefully preserved in its seating plan. In the side boxes sat the nobility and the very wealthy, ostentatiously displaying their finery. The theatre was a place at which persons of distinction went to be seen. Below them, in the pits, ‘minor gentlemen and intellectuals’ took their seats, the respectable critical audience to whom the aspiring playwright directed his best efforts. Above them, the middle gallery would be packed with the better-off tradesmen, shopkeepers, professions, and their wives. Finally in the upper gallery, squeezed in to near suffocating proximity, was ‘a motley assemblage embracing all ranks from servants to impecunious professionals’. This section of the audience was renowned for its lack of decorum. Foreign visitors were continually amazed by their lack of deference, by their habit of throwing oranges at the stage and by their noise. ‘The uproar of the common people in the theatre before the curtain rises is simply frightful’, one German tourist noted.¹ They found it hard to understand why the ruling class tolerated such behaviour, usually ascribing it to the Englishman’s love of liberty. Nor was rowdiness the only problem. Occasionally violent disturbances broke out. In 1721 a drunken peer lurched across the stage in the middle of a performance by the actor-manager, John Rich. When Rich demanded that he leave, the peer struck him. Rich hit him back, but this prompted a ‘body of young bloods’ to rush onto the stage with drawn swords. A violent brawl ensued and was only stopped when soldiers arrived. Thereafter the actors refused to perform until they were provided with a permanent attendance of guardsmen.² So the royal couple, assiduous playgoers, must have been aware that decorum was rare. However, their enjoyment of the performance on 5 March 1737 was ¹ A. Nicholl, The Garrick Stage (Manchester, 1980), 36, 40, 82, 86. ² E. Beresford Chancellor, The Pleasure Haunts of London (Constable and Co., 1925), 75. Actors were by no means pacifists. Thomas Macklin, actor-manager of Drury Lane, killed another actor in 1735 in the dressing room in a dispute over a wig!
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marred by the fact that they found themselves in the middle of an unusual manifestation of popular protest, as theatrical events onstage were quite literally overtaken by a very different theatre, the ‘theatre of riot’. In this play within a play, it was not thespians who took the leading roles but footmen. In a society where servants demonstrated wealth and social distinction, footmen represented an apex of conspicuous consumption. Selected ‘for their Size, Hair, Beauty, rather than their Industry, Fidelity and Honesty’, footmen, dressed in their expensive livery, displayed the power and grandeur of the great, while providing the necessary muscle to ensure that their master need have no fears of too close a contact with lesser mortals. To those unable to afford such luxury, footmen were a often source of irritation and anger. ‘Sylvanus Urban’, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, spoke for a readership stretching from the respectable middling sort through to the haute bourgeois and the gentry when in 1732 he lambasted them: ‘Everybody not of the highest distinction must be sensible of the Insolences of these pamper’d Hirelings . . . dirty jokes and saucy Ridicule; they sneer you full in the Face.’ Their presence at the theatre, where ‘numbers of them every Evening are lolling over the Boxes, while they keep places for their Masters’, particularly rankled. But it was during the performance itself that the behaviour of the footmen caused most offence. ‘The theatre should be esteem’d the Centre of Politeness and good manners’, Mr Urban asserted. Yet, ‘After the Play is begun, we have often seen the noblest parts of it interrupted by the Bear-Garden Quarrels in the Upper Gallery.’ ‘Footmen are a nuisance’, the editor pronounced. They should, he urged, be banished from theatrical performances. However, even he recognized that this might not be too easy to effect, for footmen were not easily shut out: ‘they lately rioted at an Assembly they could not be admitted to, and opposed the Guards that were placed for the Safety of their Masters.’³ It was to take a further five years of such prompting before the owners of the Drury Lane theatre were at last prepared to take action. They barred the footmen from attending performances in the upper gallery. The fears of Mr Urban now proved only too real. The footmen having on account of their Rudeness been denyed entrance into the Gallery they used to have allowed to them, a Body of them to the number of 300, arm’d with offensive Weapons, broke open the doors of Drury-Lane Play-House. They fought their way to the Stage Door, forc’d it open, and wounded 25 persons.
Soon the brawling mass erupted onto the stage itself, the ‘theatre of riot’ sweeping aside the professional players. This sudden interruption of the one play by another afforded an entrance to a yet another new character, the voice of authority. The stipendiary magistrate, Col. De Veil, happened to be present in the audience, seated in the pits. De Veil was not out of the top drawer. He was one of the ³ Gentleman’s Magazine, ii (March 1732), 661.
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‘trading’ justices, magistrates who made an income out of their commission, though he also obtained a lucrative employment in the Customs. The Gentleman’s Magazine reflected its readers’ prejudices when, in its later obituary of De Veil, it described such men as ‘persons despised by their superiors as needy, mercenary tools; and hated by their inferiors as instruments of oppression, yet absolutely necessary to keep the common people within due bounds.’⁴ Yet if his social status was questionable, it was to De Veil that the respectable part of the audience now looked for action. He attempted to read the Proclamation of the Riot Act: ‘but such was their violence . . . he was obstructed in the Execution of his Duty.’ Eventually, after a lengthy fracas, De Veil, presumably with the help of soldiers, managed to arrest ‘some of the Ringleaders’ and the stage was cleared. The men arrested were sent to Newgate prison to await trial. Whether the scheduled play recommenced in the wake of this extraordinary interruption we do not know. It is worth remembering that this, no doubt, highly alarming riot took place in the very centre of respectable society at an event at which a future king himself was present. There was nothing covert about the riot, nor was there any chance that the perpetrators of the ‘outrage’ might escape recognition: they wore their livery and would have been well known to their masters who were sitting in comfort in their boxes watching the entertainment on the other side of the proscenium arch. The footmen showed no hint of deference, even though their very employment depended upon their studied deference. They were angry and they did not mind who saw it. They regarded their exclusion by the management of the theatre as an attack on their ‘rights’. This was clearly shown in a letter which was sent immediately after the riot to the ‘Master’ of the theatre: Sr We are willing to admonish you before we attempt our Design, and Provide you will use us Civil, and Admitt us into our Gallery, which is our Property, according to Formalit’es; and if you think proper to Come to a Composition this way, you’ll hear no further, and if not, our Intentions is to Combine in a Body in Cognito And reduce the play house to the Ground Valuing no detection we are Indemnified.⁵
Here we encounter, in a quite unexpected environment, that strong sense of legitimacy that informed the culture of protest in Georgian England; here we find the language of ‘Property’, the belief in the inviolability of ‘rights’ made customary by practice, which characterized popular protests throughout the Hanoverian reign. The footmen believed that their free ingress into the cheapest seats in the house, to see the play that their masters were watching, was a custom long established. Such a customary ‘Property’ was worth fighting for, even in a context where there could be no ambiguity about who had done what. ⁴ Gentleman’s Magazine, xvii (1747), 562. Another account of this riot may be found in W. Stubbs and G. Talmash, The Crown Circuit Companion (London, 1749), 386–88. ⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, vii (1737), 186.
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Even when order had been restored, and two of those taken up had been duly sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour, the footmen were far from abashed. Their continuing threats to destroy the theatre necessitated a permanent guard of fifty soldiers.⁶ The footmen well knew they had a strong bargaining position, for those attributes that had secured them their position in the first place—size, good looks, and superficial demeanour—remained reasons for securing their continued employment. Alternatives were not easy to come by. Thus there does not appear to have been any general dismissal of footmen by their employers in the wake of the riot. With such assurance of their economic security, the footmen continued to exhibit their confidence in their power. It seems clear that it was not long before their demands for readmittance to their ‘Property’ were acceded to. The Drury Lane riot of the footmen demonstrates the weakness of the Hanoverian forces of law and order. No police force could be summoned for none such existed. Law and order depended upon the justice of the peace, in this case personified in the form of Col. De Veil. Justices, as we will see, were powerful figures in their respective districts with a critical role in the prosecution of felons. Yet, when faced with determined rioters, De Veil could not impose his authority, even when they were rioting in front of their own employers. It could be that, to so status-conscious a group as the footmen, De Veil, as a ‘gentlemanlike’ man but no ‘gentleman’, lacked the social position to command real authority. Yet, it is significant that, in such a socially glittering assemblage, he alone sought to quell the riot. Many of the nobility present would have been enrolled as justices of the peace, if not in London then in the surrounding counties, the Prince included since the Royal family headed every county’s justice roll. Yet they stayed in their seats and turned to de Veil to tackle the riotous footmen. In many riots in the Hanoverian period we find this same unwillingness by the very wealthy and powerful to stand up and be counted in the face of riot. They were not prepared to risk losing face in such circumstances. De Veil’s face, on the other hand, was expendable. The Drury Lane riot also demonstrated the critical role of the army in dealing with disturbances. De Veil was only saved from total humiliation by the timely arrival of soldiers, those essential props to the reimposition of public order on this and so many other occasions. Yet the army was far from an effective instrument of social control, and, as we shall see, was by no means pleased to have to shoulder this burden.
MANAGING RIOT Riot characterized Hanoverian England, with the reigns of the first three Georges probably seeing a higher level of social disorder than any other similar period, the ⁶ Ibid. 186, 251.
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Civil War included. Indeed, the regime was born into prolonged disturbance and riot. George’s German court, and German mercenary troops that he brought with him, offended English sensibilities across a wide social spectrum and this, coupled with his determination to sweep away the Tories who had dominated in Anne’s time and replace them with the great Whig magnates, made the new regime hugely unpopular in many parts of the country. This hostility was most marked in London, never a good idea when the capital was so difficult to control, while fears of a Jacobite insurrection in Scotland and the West of England added to the sense of precariousness. George I’s coronation day, a day of proclaimed national celebration, was marked by anti-Hanoverian riots in such towns as Bristol, Gloucester, Salisbury, Birmingham, Norwich, and Canterbury, while the fiercely disputed elections of 1715 saw a new wave of disturbances across the country. Across the Midlands Dissenting chapels were attacked by crowds who made no secret of their antipathy for the Hanoverians. It was in this climate that the government desperately sought to reinforce its grip on a law and order situation that threatened to unravel by recourse to a new statute: 1 George I, st.2, c.5, ‘An Act for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters’. This ‘Riot Act’, flawed in some key respects, was pushed through Parliament and received Royal Assent in July 1715, just weeks before the abortive Scottish Jacobite Rising. It was to survive as the primary judicial weapon against public disturbance until its eventual repeal in 1919. The new Act significantly changed the definition of riot and the legal context for its suppression. Before the Hanoverian succession, the law on riot was clear. At common law, an assembly of three or more persons, gathered with intent to commit disorder, were committing merely a misdemeanour. Only when those assembled began to take action to effect their illegal purpose, using force and violence, did their legal status change from that of misdemeanants to felons. Since they were now committing a felony, they could be resisted, if necessary by force of arms, not only by the authorities but by anyone. Indeed, it was the duty of every citizen, if called upon by a civil officer, to suppress riots. In such circumstances, the use of force, even lethal force, against rioters was legal and any resultant injury to, or even death of, a rioter was exempted from subsequent prosecution. This older position at common law did not, in fact, change when the new Riot Act was introduced in 1715. However, the new law reshaped the way in which riots were viewed judicially. The preamble to the new measure made clear why such an act was necessary. The current means of dealing with riot, rout, and unlawful assembly were, it was asserted, inadequate. Since unlawful assembly was only a misdemeanour, active suppression of potentially dangerous gatherings was prevented. Furthermore, the existing statutes demanded that, in the case of riotous actions, the prosecution had to prove either that specific criminal acts had been committed or that there had been clear criminal intent so to do. Such legal niceties, it was claimed, hampered effective response to, and prosecution of, riot. Riot could no longer be
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seen simply as disorder: in the context of 1715, it was perceived as a threat to the very security of the state: of late many rebellious riots and tumults have been in divers parts of this kingdom, to the disturbance of the public peace, and the endangering of His Majesty’s person and government, and the same are yet continued and fomented by persons disaffected to His Majesty . . . and by such rioters His Majesty and his administration have been most maliciously and falsely traduced, with the intent to raise divisions, and to alienate the affections of the people from His Majesty.
The new Act set out to tackle both problems. Riot was now defined as twelve or more persons being ‘tumultuously assembled together, to the disturbance of the public peace’. Tumultuous assembly was defined as a disturbance such that ‘someone of reasonable courage and firmness would be alarmed’. Any such assembly causing ‘alarm’ to the reasonably courageous now constituted a riot. Given such ‘alarming’ circumstances, the ‘rioters’ were to be confronted by ‘any one or more justice or justices of the peace, or by the sheriff of the county, or his under-sheriff, or by the mayor, bailiff or bailiffs, or other head officer’. These officers were commanded to confront the mob and to read out the ‘Proclamation’ set out in the Act. This was to be done in a style ‘commanding and with a loud voice’. Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all Persons being assembled, to immediately disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their Habititions, or to their lawful Business, upon Pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George, for preventing Tumults and riotous Assemblies. God Save the King.⁷
In a concession to concerns about civil liberties, those assembled were to be given one hour in which to depart. Failure to disperse within this time was to be ‘adjudged felony without benefit of clergy, and the offenders therein shall be adjudged felons, and shall suffer death as in case of felony without benefit of clergy’. In other words, it was no longer necessary to show that those assembled had used force or violence. The very act of continued assembly, after the hour, was now a capital crime. In these circumstances, the authorities could command the military, or any alternative power available, to employ necessary force, including lethal force, to disperse them. Such recourse to lethal force was justified since, while the defying the Act was only a felony, the effect of this defiance was deemed to be treasonable.⁸ The act was not without its drawbacks. Often it was not possible for those in the crowd to hear the reading of the Proclamation, either because of the noise generated by those assembled or because the reader lacked the requisite ⁷ D. Pickering (ed.), Statutes at Large, xiii. From the Twelfth Year of Queen Anne to the Fifth Year of George I (Cambridge, 1764), 142, 143; this was thereafter popularly referred to as ‘reading the Riot Act’. ⁸ Ibid. 144; R. Vogler, Reading the Riot Act: The Magistracy, the Police and the Army in Civil Disorder (Open University Press, 1990), 2.
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‘commanding’ voice, or, as in the Drury Lane riot, because the justice was simply shouted down. There was also the problem of the legal status of those who had not been present at the reading of the Proclamation but who had arrived, perhaps out of curiosity, at some later point. Could lethal force be legitimately be used against them? These issues continued to prove headaches for government lawyers well into the nineteenth century. Some justices mistakenly believed that they were prevented by the Act from taking any action for the space of the hour, whatever happened in between. Thus in 1780 the London magistrates stood off while the Gordon rioters inflicted massive damage to property in the city. In 1831 the Bristol authorities made the same mistake, with disastrous consequences. Both sets of justices misunderstood the law. In fact, if the crowd at any point commenced acts of ‘felonious violence’, such as attacking property or persons, they immediately became subject to prosecution under the old common law. Most magistrates away from the large urban areas seem to have had few qualms about ordering an immediate response to such actions. Indeed, many were only too willing to regard even a minor infraction of the law, such as the throwing of a stone following the reading of the proclamation, as evidence of outrage and as legitimate reason to call upon the military to open fire.⁹ Not only did the Act sanction summary judicial slaughter. To protect those effecting lethal force, a general indemnification was added to the act. In their efforts to ‘disperse, seize or apprehend’, such officers were ‘free, discharged and indemnified’ from any resultant action for ‘killing, maiming or hurting of any such Person or Persons’ who might resist their order. Individual citizens too might be indemnified should they assist in this process. This was emphasized by Lord Ellenborough in a judgment in 1801. ‘In case of any sudden riot or disturbance, any of His Majesty’s subjects, without the presence of a peace officer of any description, may arm themselves and of course may use any ordinary means of force to suppress such riot and disturbance.’¹⁰ The Riot Act was therefore, as Richard Vogler has perceptively noted, ‘a law to abolish law; a kind of modified martial law against rioters’.¹¹ By defining riot as assembly rather than actual outrages against persons or property, it allowed the officers of the state to use lethal power for forceful coercion. The Act also made it much harder for those arrested in riots to receive lesser sentences, since grand juries, which determined whether a case should be brought to trial, could not use the issue of intent as a means to moderate the full force of legal sanction. Nicholas Rogers notes, ‘The intention of the Act was clear: to circumscribe the power of juries; to enhance those of the bench; and to widen the opportunities for judicial terror and the swift suppression of public disorder.’¹² ⁹ For example, in 1753 the Bristol magistrates viewed the dissent shown by part of a crowd of miners to the justices’ order that they depart as pretext for reading the proclamation. See below p. 119. ¹⁰ R. Burns, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer (1830) v. 21. ¹¹ Vogler, Reading the Riot Act, 2. ¹² N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities (Oxford, 1989), 30.
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The Act was by no means uncritically welcomed by respectable opinion in 1715. Tories in particular saw the act, alongside the Septennial Act,¹³ as yet another aspect of the encroachment by the Whig executive on civil liberties and as a furthering of the role of the military in civil life. Periodically, determined attempts were made to repeal it in the reigns of the first two Georges. In a debate in 1734, William Pulteney, a dissident Whig, publicly repented his own part in its passage, noting, ‘while this remains a law, we cannot well be called a free people; a little justice of the peace, assisted perhaps by a serjeant and a parcel of hirelings, may at any time have the lives of twenty gentlemen of the best families in England in their power.’ Sir John Hindle Cotton likewise fulminated: Is it no grievance that a little dirty justice of the peace, the meanest and vilest tool a minister can make use of . . . should have it in his power, by reading a proclamation, to put perhaps twenty or thirty of the best subjects in England to immediate death, without any trial or form of law?¹⁴
Yet by mid-century such principled opposition had waned and Tories and Whigs alike had come to regard the Act as a necessary aspect of control. The Riot Act had been embedded in the armoury of the state. It was a weapon which was to be frequently utilized throughout the Hanoverian age. The Riot Act defined the new regime’s attitude towards the treatment of popular disorder and, in its deliberate heightening of the element of force, set the precedent which the rest of the criminal law would follow. Terror, judicial and military, characterized the Hanoverian state’s response to infractions of its rule. Capital statutes rose in number from around 50 in 1688 to over 220 by 1820 as the legislature sought to use the gallows to deter crime. However, just as ‘the bloody code’ resulted neither in the diminution of crime nor in more effective means of enforcing the law,¹⁵ in the same way the Riot Act self-evidently failed to deter rioters. Nor did it make the task of dealing with riots any easier. The reason for this was twofold. The first is that, as with the rest of the ‘bloody code’, there were real and practical problems about increasing the numbers sentenced to death by public hanging for riot. The rulers of eighteenth-century England realized quickly that the salutary effects, on those who witnessed it, of a public hanging would be devalued if hangings became an everyday occurrence. Moreover, the disruption that public hangings, attracting thousands and turned into public holidays, had on local economies was increasingly unacceptable. And even though, as noted, the Riot Act gave juries little scope for leniency, they ¹³ See pp. 181–2. ¹⁴ William Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Times to 1803 (1803) ix. 470, 442. The Gentleman’s Magazine carried numerous reports of debates in Parliament and outside in its editions from 1715 until the mid-1730s but thereafter the Act was rarely an issue. ¹⁵ For a discussion of the character and consequences of the ‘bloody code’, see J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England (Longman, 1984), 147–50; and D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Allen Lane, 1975).
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still frequently proved unwilling to convict, thus rendering the deterrent effect redundant. The second was that, whereas government ministers might long for decisive action, the structure of power in eighteenth-century England was highly devolved and its levers were in no way directly linked from government to locality. While the legislature pursued a knee-jerk approach to disorder, the forces locally available to manage disorder remained woefully inadequate. It was this problem that more than any other shaped the pattern of popular protest in Hanoverian England.
THE JUSTICES The men charged with the task of dealing with riot were the justices of the peace. They formed the essential lower strata of executive power, responsible for the day-to-day administration of law, but they were neither the direct agents of the executive in Westminster nor indeed were they greatly accountable to it. In the Civil War, the bench had grown increasingly autonomous and thereafter there was little effort to rein back its growing influence. By the start of the Hanoverian age, Landau argues, ‘So powerful were the justices that they were virtually independent . . . Neither the central government nor Parliament told them what to do, closely supervised their activity, or even insured that they act at all.’ This period in fact saw the high water mark of justice authority. ‘At no time . . . were the justices more powerful than in the century and a half following the Glorious Revolution.’¹⁶ Justices of the peace, originally ‘keepers of the kings peace’, performed three principal functions: policing, judicial, and administrative. Since medieval times, justices had been required to take on a policing function that involved the detection, pursuit, and arrest of suspected criminals and the suppression of disorder. By the eighteenth century many aspects of carrying out this function had shifted onto others—the constables, the militia, and the military—but the justices remained the focal point for the maintenance of law and order. From 1362 justices enjoyed the right to try criminal cases in quarter sessions. Technically quarter sessions in Hanoverian England could hear all cases except those involving treason, and a full range of penalties, including the death penalty, remained within its purview. Finally, the justices at the sessions made decisions relating to the running of the public affairs of the county or county borough. Since Tudor times, the quarter sessions had been identified as the appropriate point from which aspects of civil government might best be controlled and managed, with justices charged with monitoring markets and market practices, controlling wages and apprenticeship, licensing liquor sellers, and above all overseeing the poor law. ¹⁶ N. Landau, The Justices of the Peace (University of California Press, 1984), 2.
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By the Restoration, the quarter sessions were acknowledged as the supreme focus of local government. Justices of the Peace, in short, were the vital cogs in the running of what was a remarkably devolved system of government. The quarter sessions were convened at fixed times during the year—in the week after Epiphany, at Mid-Lent, in the period between Penticost and the Feast of St John the Baptist, and in the eight days of Michaelmas. This pattern was unvarying across the country. In some counties the sessions always took place in the same town or city—Gloucestershire sessions met in Gloucester itself—but in others, such as Wiltshire, the sessions met in two, three, or four locations to enable justices to concentrate upon local affairs and thereby to allow business to be more expeditiously carried out. Each justice was supposed to attend every sessions but this injunction was widely ignored. Moir’s extensive research into the Gloucestershire bench shows that on average thirteen justices attended each sessions between 1775 and 1780 while twenty and a half attended between 1785 and 1790. In Middlesex in the 1780s the figure was nearer 50 per session and in Essex and Surrey it was twenty-five.¹⁷ Average attendance was higher in the early decades of Hanoverian rule when political factors boosted interest. As with the assizes, the sessions, particularly the opening sessions of a new roll, was an occasion marked by pageantry and ceremonial. County society, led by the Lord Lieutenant and Custos Rotolorum, justices, high sheriff, high constables, bailiffs of hundreds, and the respectable classes from whom the jury was formed, used the opportunity to parade their social and economic power to a wider public. The quarter sessions was a focus for judicial power. All agreed that the decisions of the sessions were subject to review by the assizes and by higher courts such as King’s Bench. Yet Landau noted that cases of justices’ orders being appealed to the assizes were rare. The executive was reluctant to clip the wings of this most potent instrument of local power. However, from the mid-seventeenth century it became an established practice for cases involving capital crimes to be heard at the twiceyearly assizes, presided over by the King’s circuit judges. This meant that, as the eighteenth century passed, the sessions tended to be increasingly overshadowed by the assizes as more cases were traversed there for judgment. As capital statutes proliferated, the quarter sessions found itself increasingly dealing with ‘lesser’ crimes. Nonetheless, the sessions and the assizes had much in common. Both had grand juries, which determined whether a case should stand trial, and petty juries, which heard them if they did. Justices usually formed a significant part of the assizes’ grand jury, which heard presentments and then determined indictments. Most cases that reached the assizes had first been arraigned before the sessions and the power to determine the ‘tariff ’ for an offence, either by nominating a certain value for damages sustained by the accuser or by selecting the particular statute under which the accused would be tried, had major implications for the ¹⁷ E. Moir, Local Government in Gloucestershire, 1775–1820 (Bristol and Gloucestershire Archeological Society, 1969), Records Section, viii. 44–5, 77.
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prosecuted and the prosecutor alike. This aspect of discretionary justice was, as Hay has shown, a crucial part of the English legal system and central to the ways in which the ruling classes were able to maximize the effects of judicial power while deliberately ignoring its implementational weaknesses.¹⁸ The sessions were not confined to dispensing criminal justice. In its administrative mode, its work was voluminous. The sessions oversaw all aspects of the administration of the poor laws, including the raising of parish rates and decisions as to its disbursement. As far as trade and employment were concerned, the sessions validated apprenticeship, approved the licensing of alehouses, determined responsibilities for the maintenance of highways, and adjudicated on rights of settlement and the treatment of vagrants, among others. In the eighteenth century, Parliament laid still more burdens on the quarter sessions, including taking responsibility for controlling turnpikes, monitoring the levy of the land tax and the management of gaols, and implementing the increasingly complex and notorious Game laws. The sessions were also increasingly expected to provide central government with statistical information on subjects as diverse as the estimated size of crops, the costs of poor relief, and the numbers in friendly societies. It was also responsible for payment of bounties on flax cultivation and for collecting the data for the first census. The sessions also determined numerous civil disputes. Only cases concerning landed property fell beyond its purview. In all these aspects the immediacy of justice power was apparent to all. Justices therefore were at the heart of local regulation and the management of law and order. While the quarter sessions constituted the de jure focus of justices’ activities, a further arena for the dispensation of justice, the petty sessions, which allowed for more immediate and regular dispensation of judicial and administrative power, had developed. Held weekly or fortnightly in some towns, more intermittently in rural areas, the petty sessions were presided over by a couple of magistrates who dealt summarily with minor infractions of the law or imprisoned or bound over miscreants of more serious crimes for the next quarter sessions or assizes. The Webbs saw the ‘double justice’ or petty sessions as being an innovation in the eighteenth century. While it is clear that petty sessions had a longer history, it is nonetheless true that they were more frequently utilized from 1715. The growth of petty sessions again demonstrated the importance of the justices and shifted the balance of judicial power still more in their direction. Landau comments that ‘The justices, not Parliament or the central government, built petty sessions, and their elaboration of this institution underlines the interplay between change in administrative structure and change in the elite’s conduct and concept of rule.’¹⁹ At the petty sessions or in his own parlour acting as a ‘single justice’, the reach of a justice’s justice was extraordinarily wide-ranging. In the affairs of the parish, he approved the appointment of poor law officials, approved or heard complaints ¹⁸ Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, 40–9. ¹⁹ Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 8–9.
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about the assessment of parochial rates and about rates levied to maintain the highways. He had to approve the constable’s accounts. He might adjudicate upon cases of poor relief and on rights of settlement. He could lay an order on a man suspected of being the father of a bastard child. In affairs touching the local market, he could fine bakers who sold short weight loaves and imprison hawkers who sold goods without a licence. The bench, operating as a group, annually approved the granting of licences to alehouses and publicans. A justice could summon anyone to appear before the sessions, on pain of forfeiting a sum of money. He could imprison workers who refused to complete work and put in the stocks anyone who was not working at harvest time. He might order imprisonment or whipping for ‘rogues and vagabonds’, those found at play on the sabbath, and ‘lewd’ women. Like Squire Weston, he might fine men and women for foul language. The exercise of such wide-ranging powers gave a magistrate significant power over the territory within which he operated. This tended, for the majority of magistrates, to be his immediate locality. Even the most ‘active’ justice rarely operated beyond the local ‘division’ of the county in which he lived, even though their commission empowered all magistrates to act throughout the county. Influence could be exerted in many different ways. Landau notes that Kentish magistrates used their powers to manipulate poor rates to the advantage of certain groups. ‘Even a seemingly abstruse decision on the settlement of a pauper could immediately affect any parishioner wealthy enough to be assessed to the poor rate.’ This was why all members of the bench, both gentry and aristocracy, ‘displayed a seemingly inordinate concern over the details of settlement cases’.²⁰ The bench was not only the principal means of maintaining law and order. It was also an institution of political importance. The Lord Lieutenant of the county was a major figure of authority and political influence. Ministries were not prepared to have opponents filling such places and so those in post were often dismissed and replaced when factional politics at Westminster led to ministerial change.²¹ The same was true at a lesser level of the justices themselves, as governments recognized the potential importance of the bench in influencing results at elections. With general elections reduced to every seven years by the Septennial Act of 1715, it became a matter of greater importance to utilize the influence of the bench more effectively for party purposes. Moir notes, ‘Quarter sessions became a focal point for the building up of strong parties. It was because he realized this that Walpole remained a JP all his life and took his place on the bench whenever he was in Norfolk.’²² Clearly it was a mechanism that worked. A Warwickshire landowner complained in 1714, ‘the Bench of justices have such an Influence over the Freeholders in this county that they insult those poor wretches ²⁰ Ibid. 35–6. An Act in the reign of George II (16 Geo II c.18) even allowed a justice to hear cases where their own interests were intimately concerned. ²¹ Moir, Local Government in Gloucestershire, 78. ²² Ibid. 79.
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to such a degree that out of fear they seem to lose all sense of liberty.’²³ In the reign of Anne there had been purges of Whigs from the bench in many counties. The accession of the Hanoverians saw the tide turn decisively. Now Tory justices were removed wholesale from office, their departure justified by their suspected Jacobite tendencies. This policy of excluding Tories was if anything sharpened under Lord Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor from 1737, who believed that ‘Tories and Toryism constituted a threat to Whig hegemony’.²⁴ It was not until 1744 that, following the fall of Walpole and the establishment of a new ‘broad bottomed’ ministry led by the Pelhamites, there was some easing of this exclusion. Thereafter more Tories were gradually re-admitted into the commission. Moreover, after 1750, as the clarity of party differences in national politics faded, to be replaced by more obvious factionalism, so too did party conflicts fade on the bench. The Hanoverian bench, as in the previous century, was dominated by the landed. The great roll listed, in descending social order, those in the commission from the King and his sons down through the major aristocrats to the gentlemen. However, few aristocrats played a regular role on the bench. Their interests lay in Westminster. The noisome business of dealing with complaints against overseers, cross-examining putative fathers of bastards, and interrogating paupers about their rights of settlement fell predominantly upon the middling and lesser gentry. Moir argues that such men were far from the Squire Western’s of romantic fiction: in general the eighteenth-century squire had been educated well, either at one of the 400 or so grammar schools or at a public school. On any Bench a considerable number would have gone to university and possibly have followed this by a year or two at one of the Inns of Court. And even making the Grand Tour was by no means rare among country squires.²⁵
Being on the commission was seen throughout the century as a mark of social standing and as such was coveted by men with social and political ambition. However, once enrolled, such men did not always wish to do any work in the office. As Hardwicke noted, ‘Gentlemen are apt to be very pressing to get into the Commission of the Peace, and when they are appointed, to be very backward in Acting.’²⁶ This problem appears to have been a growing one. Landau notes that only a quarter of those admitted to the commission in Kent, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Herefordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Gloucestershire between 1738 and 1760 took out a dedimus, the document needed to authorize the oath of office and to empower the justice to act.²⁷ With population rising and crime and disorder apparently rising too, pressure to find willing and active justices forced the government and Lord Lieutenants to ²³ Letter from George Lucy, Herts CRO, Cowper, Panshanger Mss., D/EP F154, cited in T. Skyrme, History of the Justices of the Peace (Barry Rose, Chicester, 1991), ii. 15. ²⁴ Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 87, 103. ²⁵ Moir, The Justice of the Peace, 83. ²⁶ Cited in Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 138. ²⁷ Ibid. 141.
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diversify the social character of the commission. From the seventeenth century onwards there were complaints about ‘new money’ getting onto the bench, but much of this was simply snobbery. Nevertheless, while the bench had always included men whose fortunes were in trade rather than simply in landed estates, the number of such men increased in the eighteenth century, in particular in the second half. Predictably such developments did not meet with universal approval. Colonel Selwyn wrote to Hardwicke about moves to widen the Gloucestershire bench: ‘To Say the Truth, I believe we have descended as Low already, in filling up the Commission, as is right.’²⁸ While incorporating wealthy merchants and traders onto the bench sometimes served a political need, more often such moves reflected an acute shortage of justices in those districts with large and growing industrial populations. This was the case in Gloucestershire, with its rolling agrarian acres interspersed with the textile manufacturing districts of Stroudwater and Wotton, mining districts around Kingswood and in the Forest of Dean and the country’s second largest trading city, Bristol. The largest group on the bench (around 48–50) were the landed, a quarter of these representing families who had survived as major powers from medieval times. However, fortunes made in the cloth industry were also represented, along with the great merchant families from Bristol. Together with the odd master brewer and banker, this group of ‘trade’ made up around one-third of the bench. This was a high ratio but Gloucestershire was not exceptional in needing to secure magistrates from outside landed ranks.²⁹ Across the country such augmentation of the bench meant that between 1702 and 1761 the numbers of justices in the commission increased from 3,535 to 8,402.³⁰ Whatever the source of their wealth, however, those willing to serve on the bench had to be the owners of land, a ruling reinforced by an Act in 1732, which stipulated that no person could be justice for any county ‘who shall not have an estate of freehold or copyhold . . . of the clear yearly value of one hundred pounds over and above what will satisfy and discharge all encumbrances that may affect the same’. As the Act’s preamble made clear, it was felt that ‘constituting persons of mean estates to be Justices of the Peace may be highly prejudicial to the publick welfare.’³¹ While further acts in 1754, 1760, and 1774 tightened up the procedures about becoming a justice, they retained the land qualification at £100, which, with inflation and increasing income from rentals, meant that increasing numbers of wealthy men in trade could, with a relatively modest land holding, easily qualify. Borough magistrates were a different matter. Not all boroughs held the right to administer justice but those that had acquired county borough status, together ²⁸ Selwyn to Hardwicke, BM Add. Mss. 35602, f. 75. Others in Gloucestershire in 1754 were equally concerned at the quality of the men proposed for the new roll. ‘Many of them are Persons who are not entitled to such Trust from their Rank, Fortune or Capacities’, wrote James Dutton. Ibid. Dutton’s ordering of the requirements for a JP is revealing. ²⁹ Moir, The Justice of the Peace, 84–5. ³⁰ Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 141. ³¹ 5 Geo II, c.18
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with a non intromittent clause that excluded county JPs from acting within its boundaries, enjoyed their own exclusive jurisdiction and were entitled to appoint their own justices. Here, as in Bristol, Coventry, and Norwich, the office fell to those who filled such civic roles as mayor or alderman. Since most boroughs were in effect oligarchies, the bench here tended to represent the vested interests of those who controlled the other aspects of the town’s economy. Borough magistrates served only as long as they retained their civic role, unlike the majority of county justices who tended, from the mid-eighteenth century at least, to serve for life unless they became politically ‘suspect’. Only where a borough had a recorder, who tended to be a qualified and active lawyer, was there much longterm continuity of personnel. As, from mid-century, the bench lost much of its earlier significance in shaping county politics, it took on a more utilitarian cast as demands upon the justices’ time grew. These demands reflected the consequences of a rising population and increasing concerns among the respectable classes of a growing crime wave after 1750. Moreover, mounting levels of disorder increasingly thrust the justices into the front line of social conflicts. Food riots and industrial disturbances affected many regions between 1753 and 1800 and even counties whose local populations were not normally prone to riot found themselves faced with disturbances, as several found in 1757 when they attempted to implement the Militia Act. In these circumstances the appeal of the bench, for some gentlemen at least, waned. The need for new and active justices was increasingly resolved by filling the bench with clerical magistrates. According to Landau, clerical magistrates made up only fifty one justices in 1702 but in 1761 they numbered 932, with most of the new men having been appointed since 1740.³² Their numbers continued to grow towards 1800. In Gloucestershire fifteen were in the commission in 1780. In the counties of Cornwall, Hereford, Lincoln, Norfolk, and Somerset they accounted for over half of all active justices at the end of the century. And in Cambridgeshire the bench was ‘almost entirely clerical’. Cobbett, a bitter foe of clerical magistrates, claimed in 1811 that ‘In the country more than two-thirds, I believe, of those that attend the sessions are clergymen of the Church of England.’³³ Many clerical magistrates rose to prominence in their counties, several rising to the coveted post of Chairman of the Sessions. One such was the Revd John Foley, who chaired the Gloucestershire bench from 1796 to 1803. Another, more famous, was the Revd Richard Burn, vicar of Orton, who became chair of the Westmorland quarter sessions and who wrote the best-selling justices’ manual, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, in 1755. Historians of the bench emphasize the assiduity of clerical magistrates in carrying out the responsibilities of the office and it is clear that, without their presence, the system would have come under intolerable strain in the second half of the eighteenth century. But clerical justices did not necessarily change the ³² Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 141, 143.
³³ Cobbett’s Political Register, 22 May 1811.
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complexion of the bench in terms of attitude or outlook. While not gentry per se, they were often surrogate landlords. ‘In many cases they were the younger sons of landowners, and in a number of instances they held the family living while an elder brother was squire of the village.’³⁴ Most were also tithe holders who, with enclosure and increasing agricultural prosperity in the years after 1760, benefited from the new national market in grains and rising rentals. They reinforced the old order rather than undermining it.
THE FORCES OF L AW AND ORDER The justices possessed a great deal of legal power. But they did not have very much in the way of instrumental coercive power. Their influence over so many critical areas of economic and civil life, and their social authority, might normally prove sufficient to uphold their sway. However, magistrates generally had very little in the way of effective force with which to tackle disorder. The parish constable might be called upon to apprehend criminals and to bring them to book. However, since the position of constable was usually honorary and held, often grudgingly, for only a year by a local ratepayer whose sole means of asserting his sway was the constable’s staff, they did not provide any sort of physical presence with which to confront a mob. Special constables could be raised from the respectable ratepayers in times of emergencies. They had the advantage of being quickly assembled but the disadvantage that they might well show sympathy with the protestors. In major emergencies the posse comitatus, an assembly of all fit males over 15 years old in the county, could be raised by the High Sheriff to confront rioters. In some cases they proved highly effective, mostly through sheer weight of numbers. For example, in the food riots in the north-east in 1740, the posse very effectively put an end to attempts to seize grain from ships at Stockton on Tees.³⁵ However, as the same example showed, they could not be kept in the field for anything more than temporary periods, and their departure often signalled a recommencement of attacks. Every county also had a force of ‘javelin men’, an outwardly imposing band of men who, javelins and swords in hand, provided ceremonial accompaniment to the Lord Lieutenant at major events. They were not, however, a force that could be used actively against rioters. The largest trained local force available to maintain civil order was the militia. This body, established in the Restoration, was raised locally by a system that, until 1757, relied upon local worthies, or groups of worthies, to provide men, backed up by others supplied by the parish. The militia, organized on a county basis, were nominally under the control of the Crown but effectively headed by the Lord Lieutenants and officered by the sons of the local gentry. The men were paid a daily rate when called out and provided with weapons and rudimentary uniforms. ³⁴ Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 85
³⁵ See pp. 109, 119.
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They were, however, rarely of use in military terms, as militia regiments in the north clearly showed when confronted with the Jacobite invaders in 1745. They were also of dubious value when called upon to repress disorder, as their signal failures to put down the riots that followed George I’s coronation in 1715 proved. Since the rank and file were drawn from the local people, they showed a natural reluctance to intervene forcefully against their erstwhile neighbours: indeed, at times they were inclined to join them rather than to resist them. The militia, therefore, was a decidedly two-edged weapon to use when riots broke out. Attempts to restructure the militia in 1757 and again in 1797 gave rise to major and extensive riots on their own account. These riots in turn increased the fears that militia training given to local men might make them more effective rioters, and that the militia arms, which were located in well-known repositories, might easily be seized by rioters, a view strongly echoed in 1766 when food riots in Wiltshire were seen by some to owe their organization to militia-trained veterans.³⁶ The London militia or Trained Bands may have proved rather more successful in a policing role, though this could have owed something to the fact that its officers were drawn from the tradesmen class who had a better idea of how to manage potential disturbances.³⁷ This was seen in the anti-Irish riots that swept the capital in July 1736. The mayor of the city and the deputy lieutenant for Middlesex, whose authority included Tower Hamlets, the most populous of the Middlesex hundreds, called out the militia when English labourers working on a new church in Shoreditch were laid off and replaced by Irish labourers. A small militia detachment was patrolling when it encountered a ‘mob’ of some 700–800 rioters. The militia lieutenant, John Collet, who was a master carpenter and publican, managed the situation calmly: He desired to know the cause of their complaint; to which one of them who seem’d to be the Captn. of the Mobb made answer in the name of the rest that Mr Goswell, the builder of Shoreditch Church, had paid off his English labourers and imployed Irish because they worked cheaper and several of the Master Weaver imployed none but Irish by which means the English Manufacturers were starving, and that they chose rather to be hang’d than starved. To which Mr Collett replyed that if they wanted redress in this or in any other matter their proper Method was to get a Petition drawn to Parliament & no doubt all English Manufacturers would find Encouragement there upon proper Application and that he would find them a Gentleman to settle their case properly and assist them in obtaining Relief. That, as for Mr Goswell, he had already discharged his Irish Labourers and Employed English in their Stead and he doubted not but the Weavers would be prevailed upon to do the same. That Mr Chetham (who they said Employed near 200 Irish and against whom the Mobb was particularly incensed) had promised him that he would discharge his Irish ³⁶ See pp. 94–5, 119. ³⁷ It is disappointing that so little research has, to date, been conducted into the role of the Trained Bands in Hanoverian London.
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workmen as soon as they had finished the several pieces of work they had in Hand. After this short Parley the Mobb gave 2 or 3 huzzas and the Ring-leaders thanked Mr Collett for his advice—and immediately dispers’d and have never gathered in these parts since.³⁸
Although Collett was successful, other Middlesex militia companies proved much less effective in tackling disorder. The Craftsman argued that ‘if the Militia are not able to quell such Tumults as have lately disturb’d the Quiet of this City, They are of no Use at all.’³⁹ Nor were all London militia leaders or companies respected. A ‘letter’ from a captain of a small company in the Red Regiment of the militia complained of the ‘scandalous contempt under which [the militia] had long labour’d’. His desire to drill his men had led him to take the troop in through the open iron gates in the railings that surrounded the new church in the Strand: ‘but whilst I was busy about Them, an old Woman lock’d us in, and when I was going to march out again I found my whole Company made close Prisoners. This afforded the Mob Sport enough.’ In the end, wanting his dinner, he had paid the woman 2s. 6d. to open the gates.⁴⁰ If the provincial militia was generally of little use in suppressing disorder, the same was true for some volunteer regiments of foot soldiers formed in the late 1790s to defend the country in the event of invasion. While their supporters argued, as in the case of the Gloucestershire volunteers, that ‘there is no reason to fear the political principles of the people or their readiness to act against the common enemy’, there was concern that local hostility towards the ‘sore point of increasingly machinery’ might encourage such volunteer soldiers to turn their arms upon the mills containing machines should no external enemy appear.⁴¹ The formation of yeomanry cavalry at the same time did significantly augment the forces available to the authorities, since men able to provide their own horses were less likely to side with plebeian rioters. However, their vigour might, as at Peterloo, prove to be more a liability than a help. The justices could not call upon a local police force, since none such existed. The reason for this lay in the deep mistrust of the landed classes for such forms of executive power. The gentry, mindful of the dark days of the Commonwealth when the army and government agents had made free with executive powers and of the ways in which the Stuarts had sought to increase the power of the throne over the regions, had no intention of accepting such a force. The example from France where the monarchy maintained control through spies, informers, and local policing agencies was more than enough reason to choke off any wavering support for a police. For all the logic of the reformers, who argued that a codified system of justice, combined with a means of enforcing it, would solve the problem ³⁸ Cited in G. Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (Collins, 1952, 1970 edn.), 207. ³⁹ The Craftsman, 4 September 1736. ⁴⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, vi (September 1736), 524, 526. Genuine or not, the letter indicated the disdain with which the militia were often regarded. ⁴¹ HO 50/41, Paul to Dundas, 27 April 1798.
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of increasing criminality, the gentry firmly set their faces against it.⁴² They therefore guaranteed that rule of the locality remained in their hands. This, however, also ensured that they deprived themselves of any effective local agency of crowd control. The main instrument of crowd control, therefore, was the army. It is often forgotten that this was a major innovation. Since Cromwell, no previous regime, save that of James II and that briefly, had relied upon the army to ensure public order. The army, swearing allegiance to the Crown, not Parliament or the Constitution, was seen by many as a potential source of autocratic monarchical power and as a threat to constitutional liberties. This meant that, even in times of civil disturbance, their presence was rarely welcomed. This, and the fact that the Riot Act made every riot ‘treason’, politicized the management of disorder and from the first gave the Hanoverian reign a repressive character. The situation was not helped by Parliament’s reluctance to fund a larger army, partly because of a dislike of heavier taxes but also as a result of the deep-seated prejudice against a ‘standing army in the midst of peace’. The deep hostility to the building of barracks, associated in the popular mind with slavery, meant that, when in the field, the soldiery had to be billeted on local inns and householders at the expense of the hundred, a burden made doubly irksome in times of very high food prices since the troops’ needs for bread exacerbated local shortages. In 1756 the 20th Foot were ordered to march from Canterbury to Devizes in Wiltshire to deal with food riots and industrial unrest. Its commander, James Wolfe, reported that his men had ruined half the inns en route where they had been billeted simply because, at a time of shortage, these places could feed his men only by ‘destruction to themselves’.⁴³ Only in London were troops permanently assigned to preserve peace, namely four out of the seven regiments of footguards.⁴⁴ The Craftsman in 1736 claimed that the Guards in the city numbered in all ‘near 5,000 men’.⁴⁵ Yet even here, where most regiments had permanent quarters, the troops were dispersed as accommodation allowed. For example, the 1st Guards, two battalions strong, had its nine companies located across the city, including Holborn, Clerkenwell, St Giles, Spitalfields, and Whitechapel.⁴⁶ London was exceptional in that any loss of control here might have very serious repercussions for national security. Whig Hanoverian governments remembered the role the London ‘mob’ had played in the Glorious Revolution and in the Jacobite disturbances in 1715 and were not prepared to risk leaving the policing of the capital to the local magistrates and militia.
⁴² Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, 24–5. ⁴³ Cited in R. Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (Harper Collins, 2002), 267. ⁴⁴ T. Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (Macmillan, 1978), 195 n. 90. ⁴⁵ The Craftsman, 4 September 1736. ⁴⁶ Holmes, Redcoat, 67.
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However, soldiers were less plentiful than might be imagined. In fact, given the frequent warfare of the eighteenth century, the need to maintain a coercive presence in Scotland and to defend colonies, including, until their loss, those in America, there were seldom many men to spare to suppress riot. Black estimates that there were fewer than 15,000 troops stationed in England in the period 1715–40.⁴⁷ For its part, the army was in no way keen on having to take on the major role of law enforcement against rioters. Its troops were not trained to deal with riots but for the highly formalized manoeuvres which characterized eighteenth-century warfare: forming squares, and maintaining ranks that could systematically load, fire upon the enemy, and then step aside for the next, in consecutive waves. Such tactics, employed against civilians, would prove devastating, but most commanders believed, correctly, that they would not be acceptable to public opinion. Moreover, the soldiery was also drawn from the sort of people who were often taking part in the riots and men periodically showed a natural reluctance to fire upon them, unless directly attacked. And, finally, army officers also often regarded riot control as an affront to the dignity of the gentleman soldier. Officers were also wary of the legal consequences of their actions in such circumstances. Commanders were continually told that it was their duty to act under the orders of the justices. Under the terms of the Riot Act, soldiers could clearly be asked to use lethal force to dispel a riotous crowd. Even then, most preferred to fire over the crowd’s heads rather than directly at human targets. But the sort of circumstances in which they might respond with live fire or with their swords when the Riot Act had not been invoked were far from clear. Commanders were instructed that they were ‘not to repel force with force unless in the case of absolute necessity or being thereunto required by the civil magistrate’.⁴⁸ However, quite what constituted absolute necessity was left unclear. And there was little general trust in the judgement of the magistrates who were, in the military’s view, often either too vacillating on the one hand or over-keen to employ the soldiers aggressively on the other. A strong sense prevailed that many justices preferred to pass responsibility onto the army whenever disturbances got out of hand. Military commanders in the field adopted widely differing stances when faced with the problems of crowd control. James Wolfe, later the hero of Quebec, found himself in 1756–7 in charge of troops who had been rushed to Gloucestershire when the weavers there organized a county-wide strike. Although it was clear that some clothiers were keen to engineer a confrontation between their striking
⁴⁷ J. Black, Robert Walpole and the Nature of Politics in early Eighteenth-Century England (Macmillan, 1990), 25. J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Harvard University Press, 1990), 63, likewise accepts that, while the army was significantly augmented throughout the century, ‘armed force was of very limited value in enforcing authority in England’. ⁴⁸ Hayter, The Army and the Crowd, 28.
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workers and the troops, Wolfe was determined to avoid bloodshed if possible. Moreover, he was impressed with the demeanour of the weavers: The obstinacy of the poor half-starved weavers of broadcloth that inhabit this extraordinary country is very surprising. They beg about the country for food because they say that their masters have beat their wages too low to live upon; and I believe it is a just complaint. . . . I am afraid they will proceed to some extravagancies and force the magistrates to use our weapons against them.⁴⁹
He tried to ascertain from the War Office exactly what his powers should be in such circumstances. Lord Barrington told him, Though I very much approve of your communicating your doubts in what circumstance it may be lawful for the soldiery to use their arms for repelling riots, I am not able nor is it possible to resolve them so well as I would wish to do. The orders in these cases are not to repel force with force unless it shall be found absolutely necessary, or being thereunto required by the civil magistrates. While the magistrates do their duty, it is certainly the business of the troops to be assisting them, and to act be their directions; but if the troops (as there is much reason to be apprehended from your letter) should be left alone, the commanding officer must then be the judge of that necessity in which only he is permitted to use force, and in such case, both his prudence and humanity should make him very cautious of proceeding to extremity with an ignorant and miserable multitude, whose grievances are sometimes real and to be pitied, though their misguided attempts to redress them are to be checked and repressed.⁵⁰
Wolfe thereafter told his soldiers that they must not open fire unless so ordered by magistrates: ‘they are to receive the insults of the rabble with a soldier-like contempt.’⁵¹ Not all commanding officers took such a view. The officer in charge of troops sent to Somerset to quell the rioting weavers there in 1726 was much more keen to confront the rioters and even sought to persuade the justices to arrest a government agent, sent from Westminster to report back on the disorders, when it became clear that the man sympathized with the workers.⁵² However, all army officers were acutely aware that they might be held legally responsible for actions taken by their men who overstepped the admittedly nebulous ‘mark’. The case of Captain John Porteous, in particular, stood out as a warning to all officers about taking too direct a path of confrontation with the ‘mob’. Porteous had been in charge of the soldiers assigned in 1736 to escort a condemned prisoner from the gaol in Edinburgh to the gallows at the Grassmarket. The prisoner, Wilson, a well-known smuggler, was a popular figure in the city and there were fears that an attempt might be made to rescue him. Porteous, already an unpopular figure, chose to manacle his prisoner and, when Wilson complained ⁴⁹ R. Wright, The Life of Major General James Wolfe (London, 1864), 351, undated letter from Stroud, probably November 1756. ⁵⁰ WO 4/53, Barrington to Wolfe, 8 January 1757. ⁵¹ Wolfe to Duke of Richmond, 19 January 1757, cited in Hayter, The Army and the Crowd, 31. ⁵² See pp. 139–40.
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that his bonds were too tight, was alleged to have replied, ‘It signifies little, your pain will soon be at an end.’ The hanging proceeded without disturbance but, as the troops marched away, some in the crowd threw stones at the troops. Porteous took a musket and shot a man dead. He then ordered his men to open fire on the crowd. Not all obeyed, but those who did accounted for three dead and a dozen wounded. Victims included respectable bystanders. As the soldiers retreated, they were once more stoned and fired again, this time without any orders, killing another three people. The case shocked respectable opinion across the country and Porteous was tried for murder. He was sentenced to death, a decision welcomed in Edinburgh but not in Westminster where the Queen, acting in place of George II, who was in Hanover, reprieved him. The Edinburgh crowd, outraged, responded with a well-organized attack by some 4,000 rioters on the gaol where Porteous was being held. They captured the guardhouse, burned the gates, and seized the unfortunate man. He was dragged to the Grassmarket and lynched. The crowd was by all accounts purposeful and sober throughout. No attempt was made to resist them. The city magistrates asked General Moyle, who was encamped outside the city, to bring his troops into the city to rescue Porteous. However, since they were unwilling to give him written instructions, he refused to budge. The outraged government in Westminster sought to inflict exemplary punishment on the entire city, but, faced with united Scottish opinion, was forced to back off. In the end the city was fined £2,000 which was given as a pension to Porteous’s widow.⁵³ The Porteous case continued to reverberate across the century. Corps commanders remembered the successful prosecution of Porteous with alarm. They also remembered with bitterness the way in which the Edinburgh magistrates had refused to act decisively. This case, and the trial for murder in 1768 of two grenadiers, who had opened fire on the crowd in the ‘St George’s Day massacre’, and their officer continued to make the army reluctant to take a heavyhanded approach towards riotous crowds wherever possible.⁵⁴ Having to call in the army also carried negative implications for the justices since it indicated an inability to control their own neighbourhoods. This entailed a distinct loss of face. Magistrates therefore frequently preferred to take a high visibility approach towards crowd control, seeking to use their local reputation and authority as a means to placate rioters and persuade them to abandon their illegal activities. Such actions required a deal of courage and great deal of selfconfidence, but a successful intervention might well defuse a dangerous situation before it got out of hand. It might also add to the reputation and standing of the justice within his community, a reputation that might with advantage be used at subsequent disturbances. A London magistrate, Saunders Welch, was famed for ⁵³ Gentleman’s Magazine, vi (1736), 230, 549–50. For a full account of the riots, see H. T. Dickinson and K. Logue, ‘The Porteous Riot of 1736’, History Today, xxii (1972), 274–81. ⁵⁴ G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, (Oxford, 1962) 55.
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his interventionist approach to potentially dangerous situations. His daughter recorded how he defused a strike of shoemakers in 1766 by going ‘into Cranbourne-alley unattended, to quell the daily meetings of the journeymenshoemakers, who had struck for an increase in wages’. Immediately her father made his appearance he was recognized and his name shouted up and down the Alley, not with fear, but with a degree of exaltation. ‘Well’, said the ringleader, ‘let us get him a beer barrel and mount him’, and when he was up, they one and all gave him three cheers, and cried ‘Welch! Welch for ever!’ In the mildest manner possible, Mr Welch assured them that he was glad to find they had conducted themselves quietly, and at the same time, in the most forcible terms, persuaded them to disperse, as their meetings were illegal. He also observed to the master shoemakers, who were listening to him from their first floor windows, that as they had raised the prices of shoes on account of the increased value of provisions, they should consider that the families of their workmen had proportionate wants. The result was, that the spokesmen for the trade were called into the shops, and an additional allowance was agreed upon. The men then alternately carried Mr Welch to his office in Litchfield Street, gave him three cheers more, and set him down.⁵⁵
There were plenty of examples of similar parlays by magistrates with angry crowds as magistrates traded upon their earned reputation as honest broker. William Dallaway, the High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, rode out to meet a large food rioting crowd in 1766, supported symbolically by his javelin men but with no intention of confrontation. He heard the rioters’ case and then warned them that their behaviour was illegal, but also promised to ensure that the farmers brought grain to the local markets.⁵⁶ His actions were far from unusual. This form of crisis management depended upon the personality and political sensitivity of the justice. When it worked, it proved the case for those who believed that local figures could maintain local justice. When it failed, face was lost that might never be recovered.
CONCLUSION The Riot Act failed to prove the effective weapon hoped for in 1715. While it sanctioned draconian action in the face of riot, it did not help the justices since it made the treatment of popular protest an all-or-nothing decision. If they invoked the Act, the consequences were likely to be bloody and the legacy of such harsh treatment might well be years of bitter hatreds, perhaps even attacks on the justices’ property. Yet if the magistrates chose instead to seek to parley with the mob and failed to prevent outrages taking place, they might be condemned for failing in their principal task of maintaining the rule of law. The crowd in the ⁵⁵ J. T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times (London, 1828), 83–4. ⁵⁶ A. J. Randall, ‘The Gloucestershire Food Riots of 1766’, Midland History, x (1985), 79–80.
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eighteenth century well understood the rules of this particular game and sought to maximize their advantages within it through a series of negotiations. In some places this micro-politics gave rise to an elaborated form of what John Bohstedt has termed ‘community politics’.⁵⁷ Here the theatre of protest followed a pattern of negotiation and the incremental use of force, which crowd, bench, and employers well understood. In other places the theatre of protest took a much cruder character, either because the actors had yet to learn their roles as effectively or because one side or the other were sufficiently confident of their power to ignore the ‘formalities’. Which ever was the case, a riotous community was likely to see riot reoccur. By way of an example, we may note that the principals in the alternative play put on at Drury Lane in 1737 reappeared in a further cameo production some ten years later. This time the source of the footmen’s concern was one that directly jeopardized their employment. In 1747 footmen became concerned that a new fashion for hiring more exotic foreign servants threatened their trade. They therefore called ‘a general meeting of footmen at Hickford’s great room advertised on pretence to “prevent their bread being taken from them by Frenchmen and other foreigners” ’. Their old enemy, Col. De Veil, no doubt still smarting from their previous encounter, determined not to allow such a meeting. He ordered the room shut and, to ensure it was not reopened, took away the key. The footmen, affronted that their right of assembly had been so summarily challenged, marched to his house and demanded the key. When he refused to admit them, some forced their way inside and one man even succeeded in getting into the Colonel’s study. De Veil, armed with pistols, captured some of the intruders, but this ‘so enraged the rest that they beat in the door, rescu’d their companions and endeavour’d, by threats, to oblige the Col. to sent orders to deliver the key of the great room.’ De Veil was saved yet again by the speedy arrival of some guardsmen.⁵⁸ The footmen, it appears, had lost none of their contempt for the civil authority. ⁵⁷ J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1815 (Harvard, 1983). ⁵⁸ Gentleman’s Magazine, xvii (December 1747), 563.
3 Protesting People In 1731 a dispute arose in the Fleet prison. The debtor inmates ‘alledg’d they were ill-used and stood up for their rights and privileges’. What these ‘rights and privileges’ were is by no means clear but, inevitably, they staged a riot.¹ Such a language of ‘rights’ suffused wider Hanoverian popular protest. Any attack on perceived ‘rights’ justified resistance, whether in the marketplace, the workplace, or even the bridewell. However, in so standing up against ‘oppression’, protestors were doing far more than defending self-interest. They were drawing, consciously and deliberately, upon a model articulated and promulgated by their rulers. Indeed, protesting formed a key element in what many understood constituted the character of Englishmen. In both a religious and a political sense, it was their willingness to protest that explained why they were ‘free-born Englishmen’ and not the slaves of despots. This mood was captured by the poet James Thomson in an ‘ode’ for the musical play, Alfred, a Masque, in 1740: The nations not so blest as thee Must in their turn to tyrants fall, While thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all. Rule, Britannia! rule the waves! Britons never will be slaves.²
Thomson’s emphasis upon ‘Britons’ reflected the conscious attempt to create a new sense of nationhood which followed the Act of Union.³ Yet, if his refrain, with its image of the fleet’s expanding mastery of the seas, struck a chord, it was, then as now, the last stanza which ‘brought home the bacon’ for the audience. ‘Britons’ might share in this glorious history of liberty. But all knew that its guarantors were Englishmen, whose resistance to oppression or any threat to their rights and privileges should not be underestimated. Conventionally they added ‘never, never,’ to the ‘never will be slaves,’ just in case anyone had any doubts on the matter. Liberty would be defended against foreign powers and foreign ¹ Gentleman’s Magazine, l (1731), 264. ² The music was, famously, provided by Thomas Arne. ³ This development has been brilliantly depicted by Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Yale, 1992).
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religions. But it would also be defended against domestic tyrants. This defence of ‘liberty’ underpinned much of the community politics of eighteenth-century England. And at its heart lay a deep mistrust of the state, a distrust shared by high and low alike. The language of liberty, as noted earlier, came from above. Concepts of constitutionalism and of the ‘free-born Englishman’ were in their origins aristocratic constructions, developed in the centuries-long battle between Crown and nobility for control of the state, a battle that, centring on the twin issues of religion and the powers of Parliament, had eventually led to civil war. Both religion and the executive’s power to tax citizens continued to inform the ‘meta-narrative’ of politics into the Hanoverian reign. Legitimated by Locke and sustained by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, this battle was decisively won by the great landlords. But, in legitimating their causus belli with the Crown, the victors had promulgated the concept of the right of resistance widely. They were to find that this ‘right’ had taken deep root within popular consciousness and culture. When in 1714 the Whigs assumed the mantle of power, they found that many regarded them with suspicions no less deep than those that had faced earlier monarchical regimes. They also faced a populace that was only too willing to resist anything that smacked of a threat to popular liberties. In this resistance, while the ‘mob’ was generally to the fore, the gentlemen and the respectable middling sort were often not far behind. In this way, protest in Hanoverian England was sustained from above, as well as from below.
OPPOSING THE STATE: JACOBITES AND RELIGION The Whigs self-image was that of custodians of liberty. They were, they believed, the ones who had, in 1688, ensured the survival of parliamentary rule and of the Protestant ascendancy. Their alliance with the House of Hanover, and the agreed terms whereby George I assumed the throne, reinforced this view. Whigs were in a real sense the party of the Revolution and of protest. The Duke of Newcastle, an active organizer of anti-Jacobite mobs in London in 1715, later claimed, ‘I headed a mob once. We owe the Hanoverian succession to a mob.’⁴ Yet this was a heritage that, once in office, the Whigs preferred to forget. William Pulteney, a dissident Whig, reminded the ministry in 1734, ‘This government is founded upon resistance; it was the principle of resistance that brought about the revolution.’⁵ Other dissident Whigs also continued to press the need to safeguard popular rights. However, the rhetoric of liberty was to sit increasingly uneasily on Whig shoulders as the century progressed. ⁴ Cited in I. Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolution (Pimlico, 1992), 70. ⁵ William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (1803), ix. 470.
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The Whigs’ self-image was not widely shared, even in 1714–15. During the reign of Queen Anne, popular hostility to the Whig ‘Junto’, the cabal of Whig grandees that dominated government until 1710, had grown to bitter proportions. Whigs were readily associated with the failed policy of Continental war, economic stagnation, heavy taxes, and an ‘unpatriotic’ partiality for Dissenters. Moreover, their very close association with the moneyed interests in the City and wartime profiteering further antagonized smaller landholders in the country who felt that they were paying for Whig adventurism. Sweeping Tory victories in the violent elections of 1710 defused tensions somewhat, particularly in London where popular Toryism was a powerful force. However, the purging of Whigs from the provincial bench not only established a dangerous precedent but also exacerbated a deep and acrimonious political divide that was still in place when Anne died. When in 1714 George I determined to throw in his lot wholeheartedly with the Whig aristocracy, he ensured that the new regime would, from the first, be deeply unpopular with a large percentage of its subjects. Supported by the new King, the Whigs took up the reins of power with a vengeance. Leading Tory figures were imprisoned, the rest excluded from political office and barred from higher posts in the army and Church. Tory magistrates were dismissed wholesale and Tory merchants and financiers found themselves excluded from all public contracts. Massive bribery, using government money, and a clear instruction from George to ‘loyal’ subjects to vote Whig secured a Whig victory in the election of 1715. Nonetheless, many counties, the best barometers of public opinion, stayed in Tory hands. And on the streets of most large cities and towns, popular opinion remained determinedly hostile to the Whigs. The Whigs dubbed all their opponents, whether in Parliament or on the streets, as Jacobites. This served to taint Tories with disloyalty and treason and there is no doubt that Jacobite sentiment suffused much early popular hostility to the government. The celebrations called to commemorate the coronation of George I certainly prompted a rash of disturbances. Many reflected support for the High Church and Toryism, with shouts of ‘Sacheverell for ever, Down with the Roundheads’ recorded at Tewkesbury, and, more ominously, ‘Kill the old Rogue [George I], Kill them all, Sacheverell for ever’, at Birmingham. The elections of 1715 gave rise to displays of Jacobite sentiment, directed against Whig candidates. In London, where anti-Whig feeling was acute, riots broke out. Crowds demonstrated outside the Stock Exchange, symbol of Whig financial parasitism, with some demanding ‘A Restoration, A Stuart, High Church and Ormonde’. If the ‘mob’ led the attack, the respectable classes were not far behind. Restoration Day, a generally defunct festival that commemorated the return of Charles II in 1660, was revived in many towns and saw further violent outbreaks. At Oxford townsmen and undergraduates beat up Hanoverian loyalists. In Manchester crowds attacked Dissenting chapels and a mob proclaimed James III. Oak leaves, the
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popular symbol of the Jacobites, were widely worn and used to decorate houses. Many towns and villages in the Tory West of England demonstrated their hostility to the Hanoverians using symbols that suggested Jacobite support. At Dorchester, a mob rescued an effigy of the Pretender that dissenters were about to burn, crying, ‘Who dares to disown the Pretender?’ At Frome the crowd ‘dressed up an Idiot, called George, in a Fool’s Coat, saying Here’s our George, where’s ____.’⁶ If, in all of these events, it is impossible to disentangle anti-Whig from Jacobite feeling, hostility to those in power ran deep. In London symbolic street theatre and street violence persisted. Here, too, Jacobite symbols were widely displayed, but it was anger against the Whigs rather than support for the Pretender which galvanized opposition. As Rogers states, ‘Jacobitism was as much a consequence as a cause of popular resistance to the Hanoverian accession.’⁷ Opposition took the form of celebrations, demonstrations, and counter-demonstrations which frequently resulted in violence. Unable to maintain order other than through the military, a fact that further associated the rule of the Whigs with despotism, the government established loyalist clubs based on mug-houses or alehouses to combat the Tory domination of the streets. These ‘Mugites’, well-supplied with Whig money, hired large gangs to attack Tory supporters, or ‘Jacks’ as they were known. Starting in the summer of 1715 and lasting into the following spring, frequent pitched battles were fought with heavy casualties on both sides.⁸ Protest was already in decline when the abortive Scottish Rising took place in September/October 1715. The lack of any noticeable support in England for the rebels suggests that there was little popular love for the Stuarts. The Rising did not, however, stop popular displays of anti-ministerial feeling which indicated the persistence, indeed the augmentation, of Jacobite sentiment. London streets continued to be fertile ground for symbolic demonstrations but they were echoed elsewhere across the country. For example, attempts to celebrate George I’s birthday in Cambridge in 1716 resulted in an attack on a loyalist bonfire at Clare College, in assaults on Whigs at Trinity College, and in destruction at the meeting house.⁹ At Bristol, where the Jacobite symbols of white roses and ribbons were frequently displayed to emphasize anti-Hanoverian feeling, bonfires were held on Brandon Hill in 1716 and 1718 to celebrate the Pretender’s birthday.¹⁰ Symbolic confrontations were not confined to large towns and cities. Local clashes at villages such as Wattleton in Berkshire in 1718 and in Henstridge in Somerset ⁶ P. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), 173–88. ⁷ N. Rogers, ‘Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian London’, Past and Present, lxxix (1978), 79–80, 98. ⁸ On the character and prevalence of Jacobite disorder in London at this time see Rogers, ‘Popular Protest’ and his excellent Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 1. ⁹ Monod, Jacobitism, 204–5. ¹⁰ Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 110–11, 113.
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in 1724 over the erection of maypoles, which were regarded as Jacobite symbols, likewise reveal popular contempt for the Hanoverians and Whigs and support, if only vicarious, for the Stuarts. A magistrate at Henstridge, who took down the old maypole that the populace had ‘dressed’ and imprisoned two men who cut down a tree to replace it, found his orchards destroyed, an ox killed, and his dogs poisoned.¹¹ At Bridgwater in 1721 major riots took place on 10 June, a date celebrated by Jacobites as James III’s birthday. The corporation were firmly Tory and vociferous in their contempt for the Hanoverian Whigs. They also detested the dragoons stationed in the town. The mayor had ‘early in the morning hung a garland of white roses’, symbols of the Stuarts, on the Cornhill and draped ‘another such garland decorated with horns’ outside the dragoon officer’s lodging. His wife and children spent much of the day ‘strutting with their white roses’, clearly intending to ‘aggravate as far as they are capable the soldiers’. Violence broke out when dragoons tried to seize the roses being worn as corsages by the women. They were ‘pelted with stones . . . and this Sir was the beginning of the riot’. The soldiers returned in strength and beat up some men who were wearing Jacobite favours, but when their commander tried to pass through the Shambles, ‘the butchers took up their cleavers and ripping knives as the Mayoress had threatened if they were disturbed in their white roses, and said they would cut his dragoons to pieces if they came there or words to that effect.’ Other ‘acts of sedition continued all day’.¹² Jacobitism provided the Whigs with the justification to crush all opposition. It gave impetus to the passage of the Septennial Act in 1715, by which the Whig-dominated Parliament extended its own life, and that of all subsequent Parliaments, from three to seven years, thereby reducing accountability and, by making electoral success so much more important, increasing electoral corruption. It also legitimated the expansion of what historians have referred to as ‘legal terror’. The Riot Act began this process, but it was followed up by a succession of Acts that extended the death penalty to a wide variety of crimes. In fact, between 1715 and 1741 some thirty-one new capital statutes were approved by Parliament, most with no more than a titular nod at debate or scrutiny. The most notorious of these, the Black Act of 1723, alone added some fifty distinct ¹¹ E. P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’, Social History, iii(2) (1978), 159. That a Jacobite presence remained well into the 1720s cannot to be doubted, though historians disagree as to the level of threat Jacobite supporters posed to the state. Monod detects in the riots and demonstrations harbingers of revolutionary action, suggested by the so-called Attenbury plot of 1720 (Monod, Jacobitism, 185–6). Rogers, on the other hand, argues that such an argument remains ‘pure conjecture’ (Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain, 35–6). ¹² SP 35/27, 23, Oldmixon to Secretary of State, 10 June 1721. For the context of these disorders, see J. P. W. Rogers, ‘John Oldmixon in Bridgwater, 1716–30’, Proceedings of the Somerset Archeological and Natural History Society, cxiii (1968–9), 86–98.
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capital offences to the statute books. Radzinowicz, the noted legal historian, wrote that: There is hardly a criminal act which did not come within the provisions of the Black Act; offences against public order, against the administration of criminal justice, against property, against the person, malicious injury to property of varying degrees—all came under this statute, and were punishable by death. Thus the Act constituted in itself a complete and extremely severe criminal code.¹³
The Black Act was rushed through in response to extensive disturbances which broke out in 1723 in Windsor Forest. Here a complex series of disputes over customary forest rights, landownership, and deer hunting had led to a rumbling war between keepers and Whig landlords on the one side and, on the other, a loose coalition of gentry, small owner occupiers, and craftsmen who, because of their habit of blacking their faces to avoid recognition, were referred to as the Waltham Blacks, thus giving the act its unhappy soubriquet. This sledgehammer, created to crack the nut of determined local resistance to the wholesale appropriation by Whigs grandees of common rights, typified the preferred Whig style of rule in early Hanoverian England: legal terror and forceful coercion.¹⁴ Walpole, who himself had interests in ‘privatizing’ Windsor Forest, was assiduous in his use of claims of Jacobite plots to augment Whig power. In 1722 he suspended Habeas Corpus and encamped troops throughout that summer in Hyde Park in ‘defence’ of London. He also brought in a punitive tax on Catholics and nonjurors, in effect making those liable to tax swear an oath of allegiance. Across the country, Onslow later noted, there was ‘a strange as well as ridiculous sight to see people crowding to give a testimony of their allegiance to a Government, and cursing it at the same time for giving them the trouble of so doing.’ Many women as well as men, who have forty shillings or three pounds per annum, who never heard of a state oath in their lives . . . are told they must leave their harvest work and trot a foot fifteen or sixteen miles, to take oaths or register. The poor creatures are frightened out of their wits, and think their copyholds are to be taken from them.¹⁵
This was all a very long way from the 1688 rhetoric of liberty and constitutional rights. However, if at one level such coercive tactics proved successful, they ¹³ L. Radzinowicz, A History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (Stevens, 1984), i. 77. A detailed description may be found on pp. 49–79. The death penalty was stipulated, among others, for ‘being armed and disguised in any forest, park, etc’; ‘being armed and disguised in any warren’; ‘being armed and disguised in any high road, open heath, common or down’; ‘robbing warrens’; ‘unlawfully hunting, killing or stealing deer’; and for ‘stealing or taking any fish out of any river or pond, etc’. ¹⁴ The complex series of events and the manner they were dealt with by the authorities is the subject of a major study by Edward Thompson: E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Allen Lane, 1975). The book provides a magisterial examination of the character of Whig power and authority in the period. ¹⁵ The quotations, from the Onslow and Portland papers published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, are cited in Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 199–200.
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also alienated a significant percentage of the lesser landed and middling sorts and fostered a climate in which resistance and protest, if short of rebellion, became more rather than less tolerated outside of Whig ministerial circles. If the Whigs’ self-image as defenders of constitutional political rights was undermined by their exercise of power, the same was true of their claim to be the guarantors of the Protestant ascendancy. The Constitution, it was acknowledged on all hands, was Protestant, for freedom from the ‘tyranny’ of Catholic popes, and from monarchs who claimed the divine right of kings, was a key underpinning of the rights of the free-born Englishman. The Whigs were more than willing to augment popular hostility towards Catholics and, when politically necessary, to target them, as in 1722. Popular outbursts of anti-Catholic hostility, such as those occasioned by the ‘fears’ of growing Catholic strength in the 1730s and 1760s, served to reinforce anti-Jacobite sentiments.¹⁶ However, the Whigs also saw themselves as the guarantors of religious tolerance towards Protestant Dissent, a stance that periodically inflamed significant sections of Anglicanism. The cry of ‘the church in danger’ might not only be invoked against papists threats. It might also be directed against those Protestants who threatened to undermine the Church of England from within and thereby imperil civil liberties. Dissenters had strong links to the Whig factions, links reinforced by the Glorious Revolution. They were in consequence early targets for popular anti-Whig anger. In the summer of 1715 crowds at Manchester systematically demolished the meeting house.¹⁷ In the West Midlands violence was extensive as meeting houses at Newcastle-under-Lyne, Wolverhampton, Stafford, Lichfield, Leek, Stone, and Walsall were all gutted. At West Bromwich the meeting house was vigorously defended, under the leadership of a dragoon cornet, and several attackers taken prisoner. The following day a much larger force of rioters returned, armed with scythes, cudgels, and firearms. They eventually succeeded in destroying the building, but lost fourteen dead and over fifty injured. These riots were blamed on Jacobites but, while there was undoubtedly a core of solid Jacobite support, their influence remains a subject for conjecture. There was, however, clear evidence of hostility towards the government, as when the Mob were about pulling down the Meeting House at Wolverhampton, one of the leaders got astride upon the top of it, wav’d his Hat and cry’d out, God Damn King George and the Duke of Marlborough, and God bless King James III.¹⁸
Dissenters were to continue to feel the wrath of popular bigotry into the century. For example, in July 1736 a small meeting house at Brixworth, near Northampton, filled with a small congregation of Dissenters, was attacked by ‘the ¹⁶ On popular hostility towards Catholics in the eighteenth century, and the ‘fears’ of the 1730s and 1760s, see C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80 (Manchester, 1993), 128–9, 189–92. ¹⁷ Monod, Jacobitism, 185. ¹⁸ Flying Post, 7–9, 16–19 July 1715; House of Commons Journal, xviii (1714–18), 227.
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mob of the town’.¹⁹ Other congregations continued to experience similar harassment, while the Priestley riots in Birmingham in 1791 revealed the continuing depth of mistrust which Dissenters might arouse.²⁰ The same response greeted the developing Methodist movement. Wesley’s outdoor preaching style and attempts to inculcate essentially Anglican religion into otherwise neglected plebeian communities in the mining and manufacturing districts aroused mistrust and on occasion generated significant disorders. Those in Wednesbury in 1743–4 proved particularly extensive, with rioting and attacks upon the Methodist congregation. Here the trigger to violence stemmed from the Methodists’ decision to collect money and build their own chapel, since this could clearly be depicted as a direct threat to the Church. Systematic attacks over some nine months were waged by ‘the mob’ against the Methodists’ homes and property.²¹ Similar disorders followed Methodist revivalism in the Forest of Pendle in 1748.²² The Whigs’ apparent partiality for and concessions to Dissenters raised questions as to their commitment to the Protestant Constitution of popular conception. This fear was reactivated when, in 1753, the ministry sought to reward those wealthy Jews who had been supportive of the government during the FortyFive Rebellion through an act to allow their speedy naturalization. The ‘Jew Bill’ smacked of Whig willingness to forsake its constitutional heritage for financial advantage. It immediately generated violent opposition, though significantly not, for the most part, against Jews themselves. Anger was directed, ironically, at those senior clerics who had supported the bill. Dean Josiah Tucker of Gloucester was attacked in the street in Bristol and burned in effigy, while the Bishop of Norwich was attacked by mobs. Such was the scale of the reaction that the measure was speedily dropped.²³ ‘Popular’ religious riots of the eighteenth century represent to the modern eye one of the least acceptable forms of popular protest of the era, one reason for their comparative neglect in histories of popular disorders. Certainly there is something highly unappealing about the brute bigotry of crowds’ reactions to the apparently unthreatening exercise of religious worship by those whose faith was not Anglican. Given that the established church was itself clearly waning in both importance and appeal throughout the eighteenth century as its clergy grew fat on rising tithe income and increasingly neglected their flocks for the spas and salons, it is hard to comprehend how such an organization might have elicited such powerful popular ‘support’. However, we must remember that Anglicanism continued ¹⁹ Gentleman’s Magazine, vi (1736), 618. ²⁰ See pp. 314–17. ²¹ Some papers giving an account of the Rise and Progress of Methodism at Wednesbury in Staffordshire and other parishes adjacent; As likewise of the late Riot in those parts (London, 1744), 9–10, 13–17. In one bout of rioting in February 1744 alone, some fifty houses were destroyed. See also J. L.Waddy, The Bitter Sacred Cup: The Wednesbury Riots, 1743–4 (Pinhorns, 1976), 31–6. ²² M. F. Snape, ‘Anti-Methodism in Eighteenth-Century England: The Pendle Forest riots of 1748’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xlix(2) (1998). ²³ Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolution, 287–9; G. Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (St Martin’s Press, 1980), 80–4.
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to be widely trumpeted as a bulwark against the slavery and poverty seen as synonymous with the Catholic faith. ‘No Popery and No Wooden Shoes’ summed up neatly the rejection of the rule of absolute monarchs, black-frocked priests, and poverty. Linda Colley has shown that this sense of ‘embattled Protestantism’ pervaded not only the self-depiction and oral history of the eighteenth century but also much of its popular literature.²⁴ Fox’s Book of Martyrs, one of the few books that might be found in working-class households, sustained its gruesome tales of the torture of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary with graphic drawings of their deaths. In a different way and for a different audience, Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress likewise re-emphasized the superiority of Protestant self-improvement as Christian triumphs over the menaces of, among others, the two giants ‘Pagan’ and ‘Pope’. Fear of Catholicism was informed not only by recent domestic history. More importantly, it was sustained by war with, and frequent threats of invasion from, a militarily stronger and militantly Catholic France.²⁵ Lurid reports in the London and regional press of the progress of a counter-reformation across Europe added to a sense of beleaguerment, while the Jacobite risings in 1715 and 1745 demonstrated the ‘threat’ posed by an internal ‘fifth column’. Dissenters, of whatever variety, likewise were easily depicted as intent upon undermining the collective security of the established church, the state, and the economy. Therefore they too could be seen as a threat to liberty. The incumbent of Colne, the Revd George White, summoned up all these fears when faced with the ‘threat’ of rampant Methodism: Notice is hereby given, that if any man be mindful to enlist in his Majesty’s service, under the command of the Rev. Mr. George White, Commander-in-Chief, and John Bannister, Lieut.-General of his Majesty’s forces for the defence of the Church of England, and the support of the manufactory in and about Colne, both of which are now in danger, let him repair to the drum-head at the Cross, where each man shall receive a pint of ale in advance, and other proper encouragement.²⁶
White’s prominence in the Pendle attacks reminds us that, although we can recognize a popular ‘political’ motivation behind the hostility of the mob towards Catholics, Dissenters, Methodists, and Jews, many ‘religious’ riots evidenced the signs of influence, provocation, or complicity from above. Magistrates, gentry, and middling sort employers feature in many of these episodes in the role of champion, supporter, or condoner of riotous behaviour. The meeting house riots of 1715 certainly fitted this pattern. While newspaper reports preferred to emphasize their essentially plebeian character, it is clear that, as in Cambridge, the respectable classes were deeply involved. Indeed, in some cases there was a ²⁴ Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 18–30. ²⁵ The French ‘hate us, both on account of our religion; and because we are rich, happy and free, while they are poor, miserable and slaves’, wrote an apologist for the Militia Act in 1757. Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvii (1757), 510. ²⁶ A. C. H. Seymour, The Life and Times of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (London, 1844), i. 261, cited in Snape, ‘Anti-Methodism’, 257.
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definite element of ‘hiring’ behind the mobs. For example, a member of ‘the Wolverhampton faction’, when asked whether they had pulled down the meeting house, allegedly stated, ‘Aye, Master, we have done it, and will pull down the Church too, for the same pay that we have for that [the destruction of the meeting house].’²⁷ Local magistrates were clearly only too willing to turn a blind eye, or worse, to attacks on religious groups of whom they personally disapproved. For example, in Stoksley in Yorkshire in 1739, some Catholics sought to prosecute a ‘boy’ who had led a minor attack on their chapel. When he was taken before the local magistrate, some two hundred other ‘young fellows, march’d in order (with drum beating and colours flying)’, also attended and insisted that they too were to be charged. The magistrate, seemingly amused, ‘dismissed them, recommending it to the papists to put up with the damage’. Inevitably, the crowd then gathered further forces and destroyed the chapel completely.²⁸ At Wednesbury in 1743, the vicar preached openly that the congregation should ‘drive these fellows [Methodists] out of the country’ and, when the Methodists sought protection from the magistrates, they found themselves rebuffed. One not only refused to act but ‘waved his hat twice round his head shouting “Huzza”, indicating clearly on which side was the referee’. The curate of Walsall led the stone-throwing crowd.²⁹ Opposition around the country to the ‘Jew Bill’ in 1753 was likewise led by the respectable classes and they were prominent in orchestrating celebrations of the bill’s withdrawal, as at Devizes where ‘the gentlemen and principal tradesmen met at the Black Bear Inn, to rejoice on account of the repeal of the Jew Bill’: The effigy of a jew was carried through every street, attended with all sorts of Rough Music. A large fire was made, and they burnt the body of the jew, and set his head on the top of the pillory. The bells rang, and drink was given to the populace; several Loyal Healths were drank by the gentlemen, &c, and likewise variety of toasts, applicable to the occasion. Last Thursday, being market day, the head was again put on top of the pillory, which gave great delight to the farmers and country people.³⁰
These ‘respectable’ provocateurs provided both support and legitimation for popular resistance to anything that smacked of a diminution of the protections deemed essential to safeguard the liberties of the free-born Englishman. This pattern was to be repeated in resistance to the actions of the state in the area of fiscal policy.
OPPOSING THE STATE: TAXATION If the Whigs were regarded with suspicion over their attitudes towards the constitutional rights of the free-born Englishman, their fiscal policy was to lead them ²⁷ Flying Post, 16–19 July 1715. ²⁹ Waddy, The Bitter Sacred Cup, 10.
²⁸ Gentleman’s Magazine, xvi (1746), 40. ³⁰ Bath Journal, 7 January 1754.
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into a series of struggles in which both the plebeian mob and the respectable classes were to play significant roles in sustaining resistance. The Whig policy of military engagement on the Continent, allegedly in defence of Protestantism, was a two-edged sword, as far as popular opinion was concerned. Tory gentlemen associated war with Whig adventurism and with financial corruption. To the Whigs, war generated new trade and commercial wealth. Moreover, booty seized from foreign enemies served to bolster not just the economy but also the Whig ascendancy, a combination amply demonstrated by Admiral Anson in 1744.³¹ Defeats might require drastic action to shore up the ministry: the trial of Admiral Keppel in 1779 for his part in the loss the American colonies provides a good example.³² But victories provided the opportunities, at national and local level, for the state to reinvent its own version of patriotism. As Linda Colley notes, war, successfully waged, ‘was what the men who governed Great Britain were able to hold out as a legitimisation of their rule to the millions below them’.³³ The financial burden, however, was heavy and gave rise to what historians now refer to as ‘the fiscal-military state’,³⁴ a state in which the needs of government finances were geared directly to the successful waging of war. This required an efficient system of tax collection to maximize revenue. Two main sources were available: the land tax; and revenue from customs and excise. The land tax bore directly upon the landed class and was understandably unpopular with them. The excise, the gathering of tax on imports and on domestic production, offered wider opportunities to raise revenue. However, it was politically highly sensitive since the excise was associated in the minds of gentry and populace alike with despotic and centralizing government. And, since it relied upon local men for collection whose efforts were rewarded with a share of the proceeds, it was also viewed as corrupt. The question of taxation, in its various forms, proved to be a source of extended popular protest in the first half of the eighteenth century, uniting both the respectable classes and the common people. One reason that taxation was so widely resented was that a great deal of the money raised by the state found its way not into war chests but into the pockets of the political elite. Although there was nothing new in this, the Whigs took full advantage of their opportunities to make money, bringing into government a rapacity that was startling even for a polity used to corruption. E. P. Thompson noted: Political life in England in the 1720s had something of the sick quality of a ‘banana republic’. This is a recognised phase of commercial capitalism when predators fight for the spoils of power and have not yet agreed to submit to rational or bureaucratic rules and ³¹ See p. 191. ³² On the political significance of the trial of Keppel, see Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, ch. 4. ³³ Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 52. ³⁴ The phrase was coined by J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. xvii.
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forms. Each politician, by nepotism, interest and purchase, gathered around him a following of loyal dependants. The aim was to reward them by giving them some post in which they could milk some part of the public revenue.³⁵
Under the Whigs what William Cobbett was later memorably to term ‘Old Corruption’ ensconced itself deeply and extensively in the corridors of power. The great offices of state allowed access to a burgeoning succession of sinecures and ‘place’, posts that required no work but that paid handsome returns. Office also gave access to influence over large government contracts, monetary loans, and charters, which in turn might yield fat remuneration in the form of bribes and backhanders. Walpole, the first ‘prime’ minister, in many ways set the tone for subsequent administrations. He had, for a short while, been Paymaster General for the Whig ‘junto’, a post that he milked so assiduously that he was excluded from Parliament in 1711 for corruption. When he returned to power in 1720, he told a colleague that he ‘needed to get some fat on his bones’. He was not slow in enriching himself. Pulteney accused him of increasing his fortune ‘by indirect means and corruption’ and of squandering public money on ‘pensions, bounties and other gratuities’.³⁶ In addition to various remunerative perquisites for himself, he secured his three sons sinecures in the Exchequer which were worth some £13,400 a year. From him a great cataract of patronage, so lovingly catalogued by Namier, cascaded and developed over the next hundred years.³⁷ In this, the Whigs were fortunate to find themselves in undisputed power at the point at which England was entering a new age of capitalism. As ‘protoindustrialization’ began to transform the pace of economic activity, a commercial and shipping revolution every bit as significant as the industrial revolution of the machine age was generating growing wealth. Indeed, it speaks volumes for the vibrancy of the economy that so much wealth was available to rise, like cream, to the top where it was gobbled up by the fat cats of an aristocracy. Their ‘loadsamoney’ culture soon left the customary society of the gentry reeling in its wake. As their incomes fell with the tumbling wheat prices in the early decades of the regime, their anger was increased by the ostentation of the Whig oligarchy and the way in which their fat purses bought up borough seats wholesale. ‘The lust for oil ³⁵ Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 197. ³⁶ R. Sedgwick, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–54 (HMSO, 1970), i. 375. ³⁷ L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (Macmillan, 1929, 1968 edn.). The appendix contains a copy of the Duke of Newcastle’s expenditure from Secret Service funds to secure elections for the ministry across the country. On later dimensions of ‘Old Corruption’, see W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of Old Corruption in Britain 1780–1860’, Past and Present, ci (1983). The business of corruption extended to the very top. When George I died, it was widely expected that his successor would oust Walpole, his father’s man, but the wily minister well understood what was required in the task of keeping ‘constitutional’ monarchs onside. Just like the other Whig magnates, George II had his price, in his case £800,000 a year and the surplus of all taxes added to the civil list. That was estimated to be worth £100,000 a year. The same sum was granted to the Queen. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole (Allen Lane, 1960), ii. 168–9.
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to grease the wheels of patronage spreads corruption down through the social order’, lamented the paternalist Wiltshire magistrate, Thomas Andrews in 1738.³⁸ A growing number of the middling sort, too, resented what they saw as a criminal waste of national resources, which, they believed, they personally were generating. This corrupt and greedy nature of early Hanoverian rule was epitomized by the South Sea Bubble.³⁹ The government was anxious to find a means of reducing the burden of financing a heavy and ever-growing war debt. The old system of raising money, by sale of annuities that guaranteed an annual payment for a number of lives or specified years, was expensive. However, in 1719 directors of the South Sea Company offered a novel solution to the problem. Through assiduous lobbying and bribery, the company had acquired not only a monopoly of trade in the South Seas, as the south Atlantic and Pacific were termed, but, also the ‘assiento’, a monopolistic right to trade slaves in Spanish America. In fact, this trade never really materialized in any substance and the company was over-capitalized. The directors came up with the idea of, in effect, taking over the national debt by converting annuities into stock in the South Sea Company. To the ministry the plan seemed a fine one since the company was prepared to charge lower rates than those currently paid to annuitants. However, the scheme would only work if the stock value seemed likely to increase at a rate faster than that offered by the state. This was easily solved. Puffery turned a speculative project based on an unstable trading company into a mighty bubble. Fictitious stock was allotted to influential patrons, including Craggs, the Secretary of State, Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the King’s mistresses, in order to generate public confidence. Stock values soared, inflated in equal measure by corruption and public credulity. From a value of 130 in February 1720 they had reached 1,050 by June. Massive bribes were paid to senior ministers and to MPs to puff the stock ever higher. It is possible that the King himself was a beneficiary: he certainly was an investor. Across the country, people who owned government annuities converted them into South Sea stock and those who had savings rushed like lemmings to invest their funds. In August speculative trading reached over 35,000 transactions in one week. A host of parallel bubble companies joined in the fun, one of which was promoted to import ‘jackasses from Spain’. As its promoters realized, in a speculative boom there was no shortage of financial ‘jackasses’. Without a trading base to supply the assets to back up its stock valuation, the project was doomed. The company itself in fact undermined confidence when it sought to get the government to make rival bubble companies illegal. Insiders ³⁸ Gloucester Journal, 9 December 1738. For Andrews, see pp. 142–3. ³⁹ The only full-scale account of the events surrounding the spectacular rise and fall of the South Sea Company in 1720 remains J. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Cresset Press, 1960). See also P. M. Garber, Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 109–22; J. Hoppitt, ‘The Myths of the South Sea-Bubble’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xii (2002), 141–65.
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took their profits and sold. From a level of 1,000 in July, the stock crashed, ruining thousands. Stories of suicides, as gentlemen across the country realized their folly, filled the papers. So too did demands that those behind the bubble should be brought to book. However, there was only a token attempt to prosecute those guilty of this massive fraud. Craggs died of smallpox and his father, ‘the grey eminence of the affair’,⁴⁰ committed suicide, leaving a personal estate of some £1.5m. Aislabie was sent to the Tower, some directors had parts of their estates sequestered, and several were expelled from the Commons. The removal of the leading members of the ministry gave Walpole his chance to take control, a chance he seized with both hands. Having been himself involved, if tangentially, in puffing the bubble, he was keen to ensure that as little as possible came out concerning the implication of so many leading politicians in the affair. Stanhope, Secretary of the Treasury, another deeply tied up in the fraud, was acquitted by three votes when tried by the Commons. The chief cashier fled to the Continent but no efforts were made to extradite him to face the music. The ministry and the King realized that he knew too much to risk a trial in open court. If the Commons could be hushed up, respectable opinion outside was more vocal. A mob including shareholders attacked one prominent supporter of the scheme and another tried to murder a director in the street. ‘Several hundreds of the proprietors of the Short Annuities . . . of both sexes’ lobbied Parliament demanding justice and reminding the government that they had invested their savings on ‘Parliamentary Security’. Walpole persuaded the Commons that no accommodation should be made with them. The shareholders were incensed and vigorously refused to leave. In an extraordinary attempt to disperse them, justices were summoned and the Riot Act was read at them, twice, ineffectually. These shareholders, respectable persons of substance, at least until the bubble burst, were outraged, reminding those who would listen ‘That they came as peaceable subjects and citizens and did not expect to be used like a mob and scoundrels.’ One angry shareholder accused the politicians, ‘You first pick our pockets and then send us to gaol for complaining.’⁴¹ At a time when crime was hitting new heights, with highwaymen increasingly active across the country and even operating within the capital itself, this correlation between common criminals and politicians struck chords everywhere, not least to John Gay, who penned The Beggar’s Opera in the aftermath of the debacle. Gay had lost heavily in the bubble and his opera showed how little separated the criminal world of the ‘honest’ highwayman from the ‘fine gentlemen’ who made their money from swindles and corruption. The message was not lost on its audience and the opera was a runaway success, showing for some sixty-two consecutive performances at the Lincoln’s Inn ⁴⁰ Carswell, South Sea Bubble, 243. Craggs ‘typified his self-made generation’ (p. 244), having risen from being a barber and footman, to confidential secretary to Marlborough, an MP and joint Postmaster General in 1715. ⁴¹ Cobbett, Parliamentary History, vii. 910. See also Carswell, South Sea Bubble, 263–4.
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Fields theatre.⁴² Walpole, the target of much of the play’s satire, had to endure it, but made sure, through the offices of the Lord Chamberlain, that its successor, Polly, was denied performance. But this ban merely acted as publicity and copies of the opera dialogue sold like hot cakes, netting Gay £1,000. The collapse of the Bubble left the government with a pressing problem of revenue-raising. Walpole’s solution was to press ever harder on the excise. This was to give rise to a major crisis that entrenched further the popular distrust of the Whig state. Taxes on consumption were not new in Hanoverian England, having first been introduced in the Civil War, but the need for state income now made them an increasingly attractive means of generating revenue. Walpole set about overhauling and improving the structure and enforcement of tax collection on imported goods, setting up a system of bonded warehouses to better regulate taxable ‘luxuries’ such as tea, coffee, cocoa, and chocolate. However, soon basic consumables were also included. By the end of the decade, salt, candles, soap, malt, sugar, and leather were all paying duty. The excise was enforced by a growing army of excisemen whose salaries were paid from the revenue they collected. They therefore had every incentive to maximize tax returns. Their extensive powers of search and seizure were seen by many as a direct challenge to the civil rights of the ‘free-born Englishman’. Nominally any such search required a magistrate’s warrant, but there were innumerable stories of arbitrary forced entry and over-bearing attitudes. Cases brought by excise officers had government backing, but cases against the excise were heard ‘not by the common judges of property, but [by] wretches hired by those to whom Excise is paid’.⁴³ Moreover, excisemen were regarded as notoriously corrupt, secretly supporting the large-scale smugglers in exchange for a share of the booty, but clamping down on the smaller fry. If this assertion was hard to prove, excise corruption certainly extended into electoral politics in many boroughs where the patronage which could be exercised by customs officials proved an important element of control. For example, Rye was managed politically ‘by giving the corporation posts in the customs service, with which this stagnant port was well provided’.⁴⁴ The excise, therefore, was seen as an engine of Whig oppression. In 1733 Walpole determined to extend the excise to wine, tobacco, and salt, re-imposing an impost on salt abolished in 1730 by a rebellious Commons that agreed that it was too heavy a burden on the poor. Walpole’s main justification, he claimed, was to allow a further reduction of the Land Tax, ‘the most grievous and the most oppressive tax’ ever levied, which he had already lowered to two shillings in the pound in 1730. The landed classes had long complained about this tax, while falling rental income, the result of bumper harvests in the later 1720s and ⁴² The play was put on by the actor-manager John Rich. Wags noted that the opera made ‘Rich gay and Gay rich’. ⁴³ Dr Johnson, cited in Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolution, 85. ⁴⁴ Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 368.
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1730s, had exacerbated their sense of grievance. In fact, the Land Tax in the early 1730s generated less than 20 per cent of government revenue as against some 50 per cent already raised indirectly. Walpole’s policy was therefore deliberately regressive, aiming to pass the tax burden still further from the shoulders of the landed onto the poorer classes. There was also an element of revenge: the loss of the salt tax in 1730 had necessitated the dismissal of over 300 excisemen. Walpole wanted them back. Besides, he calculated that the landed interest, where political power resided, would be pleased with the measure. The poor would not, but they had no votes and could be ignored. He was proved spectacularly wrong. From across the country there were howls of outrage as popular opinion judged Walpole’s proposals simply as another means to bolster the oligarchy at the expense of the people. Across the country crowds paraded the streets, proclaiming ‘Wooden Shoes and No Jury’, those symbols of Continental despotism that they feared would follow the measure. The vested self-interests of merchants in the threatened trades found echoes in other ‘middling sort’ distrust of the further imposition of the excise and roused urban opinion against the measure. An effective opposition developed, with many counties and boroughs sending in angry petitions against the proposals. The petition from the corporation of St Albans typified many provincial remonstrations. It was, it claimed, ‘alarmed’ by reports of proposals to increase the excise to commodities not currently taxed and noted that, ‘as we are in profound Peace, we are surprised to find no reduction of the Land Forces which we conceive to be dangerous to our Constitution.’ Indeed, they continued, ‘we shall look upon the Continuance of so great a Body of Land Forces and an Increase in Excise Officers . . . as a Presage of an entire Subversion of our antient Constitution.’ The King, they reminded Parliament ‘came in on the Principles of Liberty and . . . can be maintained on no other’.⁴⁵ The City of London was prominent in opposition. Here, the lesser merchants and men on the Common Council were determined to be revenged for Walpole’s City Elections Act of 1732, passed to curb the influence of the lesser voters and cement the oligarchy in power in the capital’s politics.⁴⁶ Everywhere fears of a ‘general excise’, taxes across the board on consumption, whipped up by pamphleteers, fuelled popular protests. In London crowds made their feelings evident, stopping carriages and attacking Walpole’s supporters. This popular resistance found unexpected support from landowners. Walpole’s calculation that the promised decrease in the Land Tax would satisfy gentry opinion proved hopelessly wide of the mark. Paternalists were shocked by the flagrant targeting of poorer consumers and rebelled with vehemence. Even though the ministry had a large majority in the Commons, MPs could not ignore the pressure from their constituencies and it became clear that the measure might well be lost. Eventually, when Parliament reassembled in April with large angry crowds outside, Walpole ⁴⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, iii (January 1733), 44. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 98; Rogers, Whigs and Cities, 35–41.
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was forced to back down. His journey home from the House proved eventful: the crowd spotted his coach and attacked it, forcing him to run for his life through the streets and into a coffee house where he was sheltered. News of Walpole’s defeat echoed around the country with church bells being rung and bonfires lit on which effigies of Walpole were burned. In London the windows of the post office were smashed and those in carriages and coaches were forced to cry out ‘no excise’ or risk being stoned. The Mayor of Bristol even declared a public holiday.⁴⁷ The Craftsman congratulated the alliance of gentry and mercantile interests which had defeated the measure: ‘thus happily united, we may defy all the Powers on Earth to destroy our Liberties and Constitution.’⁴⁸ This furore over the excise, uniting both the respectable classes and the crowd, was repeated in regional form in 1763 when a later Whig ministry introduced the Cider Tax.⁴⁹ Facing unparalleled debts at the end of the Seven Years War, the government sought to find the revenue needed to service its massive deficit through a new excise duty on cider. The impact of this decision was particularly felt in the western ‘cider counties’ of Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, Somerset, and Worcestershire, where cider was the main alcoholic beverage. Here the feeling that one region was being singled out to fund the nation’s debt generated immediate outrage, which again witnessed agitation out-of-doors led by the landed and middling sort. Taxing cider was not new, but previous legislation had targeted the large-scale commercial dealers and retailers.⁵⁰ The Act of 1763 changed this, placing the tax burden directly onto the maker. Moreover, the duty was now to be payable on cider made for both public sale and private consumption. As William Dowdeswell, MP for Worcestershire, complained: By the manner of laying it on the maker, the old distinction between the public and the private house . . . was entirely laid aside. All cider and perry . . . became chargeable with the duty of 4s per hogshead and private houses became subject to the laws of excise.⁵¹
It was this ‘intrusion’ of the excise into private homes that so angered the gentlemen of the West, for, under the act, collectors were given sweeping powers of search. This tax from the first was presented as an attack on English liberties. ⁴⁷ Gentleman’s Magazine, iii (1733), 211–12; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 184–5. ⁴⁸ The Craftsman, 21 April 1733. The definitive account of the excise crisis remains P. Langford, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford, 1975). ⁴⁹ The following section draws upon D. Walsh, A. Randall, et al.,’The Cider Tax, Popular Symbolism and Opposition in Mid-Hanoverian England’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996) 69–90. For the politics of the Cider Tax, see P. T. M. Woodland, ‘ExtraParliamentary Political Organization in the Making: Benjamin Heath and the Opposition to the 1763 Cider Tax’, Parliamentary History, iv (1985), 115–36. ⁵⁰ C. D. Chandaman, The English Public Revenue 1660–1688 (Oxford, 1975), 41–6. See also J. Owens, A History of the Excise (Linlithgow, 1879). ⁵¹ British Library, Hardwicke Papers, Ad. Mss. 35,879, ff. 347–54, Dowdeswell to Hardwicke, 6 March 1766.
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The regional press immediately took up the cause. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal declared: let not Britain’s (sic) plant orchards in vain, or be deprived of the benefits arising from his industry, or have an Exciseman as Overseer in his family. The extending of the Excise is evidently subversive to Liberty; that on tobacco would affect but few, but on cyder the whole community.⁵²
The Gloucester Journal urged resistance, reminding its readers of ‘the glorious victory of 1733 over the most hellish design that was ever projected’.⁵³ Leading political figures such as Dowdeswell urged protest against the tax on similar lines: it was incumbent on all in the West ‘to protect from Excise the private house, to protect the farmer, cottager and labourer from those penalties which their want of knowledge so often subjects them to, to guard them from the power of oppression’. However, while the gentlemen declaimed in the press, the crowd took up the issue in their own way. Celebrations to welcome the Peace provided a backcloth for displays of popular anger. The usual features of such events—tableaux, feasts, bonfires—were all subverted by popular expressions of indignation, which seem to have owed nothing to the respectable classes.⁵⁴ At Stroud an apple tree, which had been cut down for that purpose, was carried in the procession together with an effigy as large as life, with the letter B [Bute, the prime Minister] inscribed on the back: at the closing of the cavalcade, the effigy was put into the stocks, then hung up by the common hangman, and afterwards burnt to ashes: the same ceremony, we hear, was observed at Dursley, and other parts of the country of Gloucester.⁵⁵
At Worcester, crowds expressed ‘their great sorrow and concern, at the late woeful tax on cyder’,⁵⁶ while in Exeter the demonstrations were very elaborate: At a Publick House, a figure was prepared, the lower part of which represented a Jack-Boot, the upper part of it was dress’d in a plaid Bonnet, with a star. This figure was exposed to view the whole day. . . . About six O’clock began another procession in the manner following: First, a man riding an Ass, and on his back the inscription From the Excise and the Devil good Lord deliver us. A strip of apples, in Mourning, was hung round the Ass’s neck, which was supported by thirty or forty men, each having a white Wand, with an Apple at the top of it, also in Mourning. Next came a cart, with a gallows fixed on it, and the plaid figure hanging by the neck. After that came a cyder hogshead, with a Pall over it, carried by six men in black Cloaks: on the Pall was a number of Escutcheons with Inscriptions to the same effect as those above mentioned. The whole was accompanied by some thousands of People hallowing and shouting through the principal Streets of the City, and at night a bonfire was prepared into which they cast the Figure, and burnt it to ashes.⁵⁷
⁵² Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 2 April 1763. ⁵³ Gloucester Journal, 28 March 1763. ⁵⁴ Careful scrutiny reveals little that might suggest any common origin or transmission of the model. Even government supporters could detect no coordinating agency or scapegoat. ⁵⁵ Bath Chronicle, 28 April 1763. ⁵⁶ Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 12 May 1763. ⁵⁷ Bath Chronicle, 19 May 1763.
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We rarely get to hear of these more plebeian forms of peaceful demonstration since they were too often seen as illegitimate forms of protest, but in this case the press was keen to record them. Indeed, the tone of reports was indulgent and often encouraging. Demonstrations at Cheltenham were described by the Bath Chronicle, a paper generally hostile to any popular demonstration, as ‘whimsical’. It also reported favourably on other towns where, when ‘the proclamation of the peace was read, several church bells were toll’d, as for a burial, and cyder and perry were given to the populace to prevent the payment of the excise.’⁵⁸ Berrow’s Worcester Journal openly told its readers how to avoid the excise with its ‘hints to cyder-makers’.⁵⁹ The demonstrations in the West alarmed the government. Disorders were feared, a prospect brought home when in London sailors demonstrated against the tax, displaying favours that read ‘Liberty, Property and No Excise’.⁶⁰ In early August, an effigy of Bute was reported to be still hanging at Exeter since no one dared to cut it down.⁶¹ The same was reported from Monmouth.⁶² From Ilminster in Somerset came reports that the region was in a state of ‘fury’, while the Sherborne Mercury warned, ‘we shall have a state of war if these disturbances continued’.⁶³ Having galvanized popular opinion, politicians in the West sought to distance themselves from the crowd. A remarkable organization, which presaged the more radical Association Movement of the later 1770s, was set up, based on district committees of freeholders, county subcommittees, and large county-wide standing committees, serviced by salaried clerks, to press for repeal.⁶⁴ Respectability was now at a premium. As the High Sheriff of Worcestershire noted: ’tis proper that the Ministry should be convinced, that the Repeal of this Law is contended for, not by a Set of clamorous People, out of place, not by an insignificant Number of Men, but by the largest and most respectable Born in the Kingdom, acting on principles founded in Reason, justified by Experience, and warranted by the Constitution.⁶⁵
However, plebeian resistance to the excise continued. In the notoriously independent Forest of Dean, the free miners captured an exciseman who was ‘going his rounds to the cider mills’ and held him hostage in a mine.⁶⁶ Two excise collectors in Bristol resigned their commissions when forced by a mob to swear on oath that they would never more seek to tax cider,⁶⁷ while another officer at Exeter was attacked by a crowd who cut the ears off his horse.⁶⁸ Such direct action seems to ⁵⁸ Bath Chronicle, 28 April 1763. ⁵⁹ Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 30 June 1763. ⁶⁰ Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 16 April 1763. ⁶¹ British Library, Newcastle Papers, Add. Mss. 32,950, f. 1, Hardwicke to Newcastle, 1 August 1763. ⁶² Cited in J. Brewer, ‘The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Political Argument and Public Opinion’, Historical Journal, xvi (1973). ⁶³ Exeter Flying Post, 16 May 1763; Sherborne Mercury, 23 May 1763. ⁶⁴ Woodland, ‘Extra-Parliamentary Political Organization in the Making’, 130. ⁶⁵ Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 25 August 1763. ⁶⁶ Bath Journal, 25 July 1763. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 10 October 1763. ⁶⁸ Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 28 July 1763.
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have significantly reduced the fiscal ‘take’ from the tax and may well have proved central in discrediting the tax. In contrast, the ‘political’ campaign of lobbying proved ineffectual. The hated Bute was soon driven from office, but it was not until Dowdeswell himself became Chancellor of the Exchequer in July 1765 that it was finally repealed.⁶⁹ The excise crisis in 1733 and the Cider Tax in 1763 revealed the deep hostility of all classes to governmental tax policies. The attempt in 1760 to raise the duty on beer affected more plebeian consumers but produced similar effects. The price of beer had stayed constant from 1722 until the government, again beset with war debt, decided to increase the duty payable by brewers from 5s. to 8s. per barrel. Before the Act was brought in, many leading London brewers sought to pass on the price increase to publicans at a rate of 30s. per barrel for strong beer, resulting in a rise of 1⁄2d. a pint. Such a threat to the main drink of the labouring poor across much of the country provoked immediate outrage. ‘Tumults were reported in Norwich and leading London brewers were threatened with “popular action”.’ Even the King was made firmly aware that this was a tax too far. With the Queen, he was attending Garrick’s performance of A Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane Theatre. As the famous actor delivered the line, ‘For you, my hearts of oak, for your regale, Here’s good old English stingo, mild and stale’, a man in the gallery, that haunt of the poorer audience and footmen, shouted out, ‘At threepence a pot, Mister Garrick, or confusion to the brewers.’⁷⁰ The Annual Register reported, ‘Some tumults were occasioned . . . in many parts of the town, where labouring and poor people generally live, and great discontent and murmuring everywhere.’ Significantly, many Westminster publicans were taken up before the justices as consumers drew attention to an act ‘passed in the reign of King William III which fixes beer at 3d per quart’. Many were fined. Magistrates seem to have agreed with consumers that, as malt and hops were cheap, brewers could afford to absorb the tax. Publicans soon gave up the higher prices ‘as they found their houses deserted by their customers’.⁷¹ To the Whigs, the opposition to their tax-raising policies reflected the stubbornness of a world that was passing. Their deliberate attempt to shift tax from the equivalent of income (the Land Tax) to consumption reflected their belief that a modern state needed a wider tax base. The tax imposed on the rapidly increasing import of West Indian molasses in 1733 clearly demonstrated this model. The policy, however, also indicated a deliberate attempt to pass the burden of government down to the poorer consumer. To Tories and old paternalists, such a policy represented an attack upon customary society and customary social obligations. These paternalist views retained real resonance in the early Hanoverian age. Thus it was the re-imposition of the tax on salt, a tax that would ⁶⁹ Woodland, ‘Extra-Parliamentary Political Organisation’, 129–30. ⁷⁰ P. Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 1959), 113. ⁷¹ Annual Register, iv (1761), 124–5. The Register noted that the real cost of the tax to the brewers accounted for only 1/13th part of the increased prices.
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have hit the poorest hardest, which provoked most anger in 1733, from rich and poor alike, whereas that to introduce an excise on wine and tobacco, which hit wealthier consumers, roused little ire. The 1763 tax on cider bore directly upon small peasant farmer producers and the poorest consumers who drank cider, yet the respectable classes again took a leading role in the process of resistance. The continuing hostility in the capital towards the coal tax showed the same pattern. This tax, initially levied to pay off the rebuilding of St Paul’s, was still in place in 1736, ‘mortgaged for the Use of the civil Government and, in a manner, made perpetual’.⁷² All classes regarded the proliferating ‘army’ of excisemen with suspicion. They smacked of the ‘Continental’ spy systems, which gentry, middling sort, and poor alike feared might be used to undermine the rights of the free-born Englishman and suborn the independence of county authorities. Excisemen and customs officers were equated in the popular mind with common informers, men and women who made a living by denouncing those who transgressed the laws, and who were widely hated.⁷³ This, no doubt, exaggerated hostility to excisemen also reflected the fact that the ‘black economy’ of smuggled goods formed an illicit bond that tied the rich and poor alike into a tacit alliance of silent opposition to the revenue. As consumer taxes rose, few landed or middling-sort households remained immune from the attractions of cheap smuggled goods, which found their ways easily onto the tables of rich and poor alike. When a gentleman entertained guests with fine French wines, or his wife and daughters trimmed their gowns with silks, when the tradesman enjoyed a glass of brandy and when the artisan drank a cup of tea, the chances were that they were all consuming illicit goods. Most were only too well aware of this fact. For example, Thomas Turner, a determinedly respectable small shopkeeper from East Hoathly in Sussex, was happy to sit down with ‘Mr Carman, Mr Fuller and myself, in the even, with a bowl of punch’ made from brandy that had recently been purchased from smugglers. Parson Woodforde, in his peaceful parsonage at Weston Longeville in Norfolk, bought tea, gin, brandy, and silk handkerchiefs from local smugglers: ‘Andrews the Smuggler brought me this night about 11 o’clock a bagg of Hyson Tea 6 Pd weight. He frightened us a little by whistling under the Parlour Window just as we were going to bed.’⁷⁴ Woodforde, like many others, dreaded a visit from the excisemen. On 12 October 1792 he recorded that John Buck, the blacksmith and one of his regular suppliers ⁷² The Craftsman, 4 September 1736. ⁷³ The Gin Act of 1736, seeking to prohibit the unfettered sale of gin, resulted in some 12,000 informations laid against dealers and in numerous attacks upon informants. G. Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (Collins, 1952, 1970 edn.), 201–1. See also R. Sheldon, A. Randall, et al., ‘Popular protest and the Persistence of Customary Corn Measures: Resistance to the Winchester Bushel in the English West’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest, 38. ⁷⁴ T. Turner, The Diary of a Georgian Shopkeeper, ed. G. H. Jennings, (Oxford, 1979), 60; J. Woodforde, Diary of a Country Parson, 1758–1802, ed. J. Beresford (Oxford, 1963), 131. See also pp. 292, 421–2, 475.
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of contraband, ‘who was lately informed against for having a Tub of Gin found in his House that was smuggled, by two Excise Officers’, had been fined.⁷⁵ Visits from the excise did not always end so easily. When Southampton customs men marched out to search the house of Captain Gwyn in 1748, they found themselves confronted by ‘a posse’ of his neighbours. The officers had prudently brought along some marines and for a while it looked as if the contraband in the house would be handed over. But when, after a brief conference between Gwyn and the marines’ lieutenant, the soldiers were withdrawn, the ‘posse’ grew more threatening. The local constable told the customs men ‘it was a damned scandalous villainous thing, and the most dangerous ever known, for them to offer to come to search a Gentleman’s house, for to take away such a small sample of liquor.’ The officers retreated.⁷⁶ The Duke of Richmond believed that ‘the common people of this country have no notion that smuggling is a crime.’ Winslow notes that, in Sussex, ‘Smuggling, far from being seen as an illegal activity by the Sussex poor, was considered a legitimate part of the local economy.’⁷⁷ Unlike other forms of what John Rule has dubbed ‘social crime’,⁷⁸ smuggling was, in the main, run by highly capitalized criminals, with large gangs, controlled with military discipline, increasingly dominating the business. They showed little regard for the law. For example, in 1748 some ‘Thirty smugglers, with blunderbusses and pistols, at 2 in the morning, broke open the King’s warehouse at Colchester, with a large blacksmith’s hammer and crow, and carry’d off 60 oil bags, containing about 1514 pounds of tea.’⁷⁹ Their distribution networks, stretching well inland from the coasts of southern and eastern England, relied upon good organization and a network of retailers. Some of these were men of real substance. For example, a Southwark grocer, Samuel Hulme, had some 6000 lb of tea seized in one raid.⁸⁰ But smuggling also thrived because the respectable classes in the main turned a blind eye, sometimes through fear, sometimes as a result of bribes, but mainly because the majority saw no reason to pay the state an impost on goods that could otherwise be obtained tax free. Not all gentlemen were prepared to tolerate the smugglers. This was particularly the case where the strength of the latter undermined the authority of the former to an unacceptable degree. Richmond was prompted to embark upon a bitter war with the smugglers in Sussex following an extraordinary series of events in 1747 which resulted in the brutal murder of a customs officer and an informer ⁷⁵ Ibid. 424. It did not stop Woodforde from purchasing ‘a Tub of Brandy and a Tub of Rum’ from smugglers eleven days later. ⁷⁶ C. Winslow, ‘Sussex Smugglers’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Allen Lane, 1975), 143. ⁷⁷ Ibid. 149. ⁷⁸ J. Rule, ‘Social Crime in the Rural South in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Southern History, i (1979), reprinted in J. Rule and R. Wells, Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England 1740–1850 (Hambledon, 1997), 153, passim. ⁷⁹ Gentleman’s Magazine, xviii (1748), 186. ⁸⁰ Winslow, ‘Sussex Smugglers’, 148.
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on his extensive estates. A cargo of smuggled tea bound for Sussex was seized at sea by the navy and taken to Poole on the far side of Dorset. A gang of west Sussex smugglers, together with a notorious gang from Hawkhurst in Kent, numbering in all between thirty and sixty men, all heavily armed, marched openly across two counties to attack the customs house at Poole and liberate the tea. Their return was treated like a procession. For example, at Fordingbridge where they stopped for breakfast, ‘several hundreds of people were assembled to view the cavalcade’. However, a man to whom the gang presented a bag of tea was recognized and persuaded to turn evidence. When some month later, he and a customs officer were recognized en route to Sussex to testify against some smugglers, both men were captured and killed. Richmond thereafter campaigned relentlessly against the local smugglers, with limited results.⁸¹ For nobles like Richmond, and to the government, smuggling gangs constituted an affront to their authority and justified a frequent recourse to using the military. But the army and navy did not intimidate all smugglers. In 1784 the sloop of war HMS Orestes, on station in the Solent to secure smugglers, was tipped off that two luggers were in-bound from the Channel Islands with a cargo of tea and brandy. The sloop missed the craft but came upon the smugglers as they were unloading onto the beach at Mudeford, assisted by some 300 locals. Seeing the navy vessel, the captains of the luggers ran their boats onto the beach and stripped them before retreating to nearby buildings. From here they opened withering fire on a naval party that landed to take possession of the craft. The battle lasted from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. that night and, though the boats were lost, the cargo of 120,000 gallons of spirits and 30–40 tons of tea was saved. One sailor was killed but, though the two captains were captured and tried, both escaped the gallows since it was impossible to prove who had fired the fatal shot.⁸²
CONCLUSION The hostility towards the revenue, though general, was but one aspect of the general antipathy towards wider encroachments by the state. Other intrusions resulted in cross-class opposition. The frequent low-level disturbances against the activities of the press gang usually involved only the poorer classes, but raised the concerns of some gentlemen at this transparent abuse of civil liberties. The attempt to enlarge the militia in 1757, however, touched more respectable classes country-wide and was to produce one of the most extraordinary episodes of popular protest in the eighteenth century.⁸³ The hostility with which early turnpike trusts, granted the right to ‘privatize’ the highway on the basis of an ⁸¹ Winslow, ‘Sussex Smugglers’, 136–9. ⁸² G. Morley, Smuggling in Hampshire and Dorset, 1700–1880 (Countryside, 1983), 75–83. ⁸³ See pp. 166–70.
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Act of Parliament, were viewed likewise reflected a deep anger against ‘central’ support for a modernizing economy where the petty producer and consumer bore the burden of improving transport links, which disproportionately benefited the rich.⁸⁴ The ‘calendar’ riots were not dissimilar. In September 1752 an act, passed the previous year, replacing the old Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar, was implemented. Its intention was simple: to bring dates back into line with the seasons; and to bring Britain into line with much of Western Europe, thereby assisting with trade. It was a classic example of ‘modernism’. Famously it gave rise to popular protest, since the process of rectifying the anomalies of the older Julian calendar meant that eleven days ‘disappeared’ from the month of September. As Stevenson has noted, these disorders, led by mobs demanding ‘give us back our eleven days’, stemmed not from ‘irrational ignorance’ but from entirely pragmatic reasons.⁸⁵ Debts, contracts, and formal agreements falling due within the ‘lost’ days now seemed to have no legal authority, employers baulked at paying a month’s wages for a substantially curtailed period and the whole rhythm of work in many outworking trades was severely upset. The shift of the start of the year from its traditional 25 March to 1 January likewise caused major problems for rental agreements, annual hiring arrangements, and apprenticeship indentures. Not everyone readily adapted. A report from Bristol early in the new year noted: Yesterday being old Christmas Day [January 5], the same was obstinately observed by our country people in general; so that yesterday (which was market day according to the order of our magistrates) there were but few at market, who embraced the opportunity of raising their butter to 9d. and 10d. a pound.⁸⁶
At Glastonbury, where annually people congregated to witness the flowering, or blowing, of St Joseph’s thorn on Christmas Eve, crowds gathered on ‘ChristmasEve New-Stile’: but to their great disappointment, there was no appearance of its blowing, which made them watch it narrowly the fifth of January, the Christmas-Day old stile, when it blowed as usual, and in one day’s time was as white as a sheet, to the great mortification of many families in that neighbourhood, who had tapp’d their ale eleven days too soon.⁸⁷
Such stories might be read two ways: showing the backwardness of ‘country people’, or demonstrating the sagacity of old ways. Either way, the new calendar demonstrated the power of the state to impose modernity upon customary practice. If the executive usually had its way, the Whigs’ modernizing project generally failed to win the battle for the hearts and minds of its citizens, for the state could ⁸⁴ See pp. 160–6. ⁸⁵ J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (Longman, 1979, 1992 edn.), 3–4. ⁸⁶ Bath Journal, 8 January 1753. ⁸⁷ Ibid. 15 January 1753.
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not slough off its own deserved reputation for corruption. Taxes, and especially taxes upon consumption, were seen simply as means to redistribute wealth from producers and the needy into the maws of those on the aristocratic gravy train. Central government was tolerated but not embraced. Indeed, its citizens, both great and small, regarded its every action as a potential threat to their liberties and livelihoods. This attitude did much to engender an ethos of resistance in other fields. If the respectable classes might argue that their ‘political’ resistance differed from the ‘riots’ of the poor, they could not escape the fact that they, in their resistance to the encroachments of the state, provided the crowd with both models and symbols for future actions. They also helped to reinforce that sense of legitimation which characterized popular protest. The rights of the free-born Englishman were not merely the perquisites of the wealthy. The crowd, too, ‘never, never, never’, would be slaves.
4 Food, Market Custom, and Protest In April 1768, a time of considerable economic and social tension, the editor of the Gloucester Journal received and published the following account of an extraordinary demonstration which had taken place on market day at Tetbury, a town on the high Cotswolds between Stroud and Malmesbury. Sir, on Wednesday last, an old venerable bushel containing nine gallons and a half adorned with trophies, was ordered into our market with drums and trumpet, bells and bonfire; and then conducted to the parish church, amidst the acclamation of all orders and degrees of men, regular and secular, and there suspended, to the great terror and amazement of the farmers, on the top of our lofty steeple. This, Mr Printer, is a specimen of the tastes and spirit of this memorable place, ever zealous in affection to the church, loyalty to the King, and a strict attachment to the laws of the realm.¹
Market days in the eighteenth century, in anything but the smallest markets towns, were days of bustle and excitement. A wide variety of produce would be brought in from the surrounding districts and beyond for sale. On the roads into the town the larger farmers’ carts carrying wheat and barley jostled with stockmen driving small groups of livestock, with small traders selling local produce and with packmen, pedlars, higglers, and hucksters all intent on toting their wares. There too would be the ‘country people’, small farmers, peasant producers, and their wives bringing with them butter, cheese, and eggs in large wicker baskets, sacks of vegetables, and withy cages with chickens and even rabbits, all of which would be hawked around the market. In season too there would be baskets of mushrooms, of berries and soft fruits such as elderberries, blackberries, and wild strawberries, of hazel nuts and chestnuts, gathered by the labouring poor and brought into town to sell on market day, to supplement their meagre incomes.² In every marketplace on market day the different economies of large-scale agrarian capitalist, petty peasant producer, and scratch-as-scratch-can semi-subsistence coincided. Market days were also always times of social intercourse where the great and the small rubbed shoulders, where friends from different villages and towns around ¹ Gloucester Journal, 25 April 1768. ² In Staffordshire, for example, Swynnerton Park was ‘much resorted to during the season by many of the poor for the purpose of gathering bilberries, which they sell to the nearest towns and villages’. W. Pitt, Topographical History of Staffordshire (1817), 385.
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met, and where farmers foregathered at their favourite inns, no doubt to complain about the weather, prices, and rents. With the presence of street entertainers and ballad singers, with the inns and alehouses full of customers with money in their pockets, market day could prove to be days of some revelry. But they could also be much more tense affairs. Markets attracted criminals: theft, fraud, and personal violence were far from unknown. At times of rapidly rising food prices, market day could also easily turn into riot day as angry consumers seized foodstuffs and ‘set the price’ or simply made off with produce. For all these reasons, the local authorities were always alert for trouble whenever market day dawned. Yet the events in Tetbury market were something far out of the ordinary. The drums and trumpet, bells and bonfire all indicated a pre-planned piece of social theatre, an unmistakable display of symbolism and civic ‘rough music’. The acclamation of ‘all orders and degrees of men, regular and secular’, showed that this was not merely an improvization staged by hoi polloi but a play which represented wider civic feeling and demonstration of opinion. The choice of the parish church was important, representing as it did the authority of a greater law. Its lofty steeple, and ones like it elsewhere, were not usually adorned with bushels, whether venerable or not. Moreover, despite the correspondent’s claim that the populace of Tetbury were ‘ever zealous’ in their ‘strict attachment to the laws of the realm’, the object of their celebration, the ‘old venerable bushel containing nine gallons and a half ’, was in fact an illegal measure, proscribed by a body of legislation that in one form or another dated back into the middle ages. The events in Tetbury, in fact, symbolized a continuing determination here, as in many towns, to resist the introduction of the standard eight-gallon Winchester bushel.³ The Winchester standards, of which the bushel, a measure of capacity, was a centrepiece, had a long history, stretching back to Saxon times when they had been prescribed for all transactions. Yet repeated attempts by government thereafter to enforce the single standard on markets across the country had signally failed, despite numerous proclamations and campaigns to enforce compliance. For example, a writer in 1620 noted the hostile reception given in the West to attempts to enforce the Winchester bushel: I cannot persuade the corne seller to make his price according to the abatement of the measure. Beside I understand that the clerk of the markett in the Countie of Devon hathe bene so rudelye dealt with there as of late as his lyfe hathe bene hassarded twice by the Countrye people.⁴ ³ For an extended account of resistance to the Winchester bushel and its implications for the development of a national market in grain, see R. Sheldon, A. J. Randall, et al., ‘Popular Protest and the Persistence of Customary Corn Measures: Resistance to the Winchester Bushel in the English West’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996), 25–45. This chapter draws heavily upon that work. ⁴ State Papers Domestic, James I, 24 June 1620, cited in W. H. Beveridge, ‘A Statistical Crime of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Economic and Business History, i (1928–9).
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In 1670, to back up a new tighter codification of the Winchester measure, brass ‘exchequer bushels’ were sent to every chartered market town, together with injunctions that they be chained in prominent positions in the public market. Hefty fines were to be levied not only on those who ignored the measure in transactions but also on the ‘mayor or any other head officer’ who allowed such infractions.⁵ Yet, other than in those markets in the south-east dealing directly with the London grain trade, this too often proved a failure. In the eighteenth century, governmental pressure to impose the Winchester bushel increased. County authorities were instructed to enforce compliance. The Gloucestershire bench duly made orders in 1709, 1767, and again in 1769, without noticeable effect.⁶ In neighbouring Wiltshire and Somerset the same thing occurred. Attempts were made in 1793 to enforce ‘legal weights and measures’ in Leicestershire but were pronounced failures in 1809.⁷ Market towns in Staffordshire ignored the Winchester measure, while the city of Oxford resisted any change from its customary measure until after 1800. Even in the supposed centre of the Winchester bushel’s territory, the south-east, customary measures remained in use. Not until the early 1790s did the farmers in Sussex attempt to force the acceptance of the Winchester bushel on local markets, claiming that the proliferation of different sized bushels from market to market hampered trade and arguing that the customary measure ‘held too much’. They do not appear to have been successful.⁸ These local measures were remarkably heterogeneous. Many markets used bushels of nine gallons, such as Tewkesbury in 1769.⁹ Many Bedfordshire markets used a customary bushel of 81⁄4 gallons until shortly before 1808.¹⁰ In 1810 the Gloucester Journal referred to the ‘customary’ 91⁄2 gallon bushel¹¹ and other places had even larger measures.¹² This extraordinary array of customary weights and measures was well seen in Wolverhampton market: the custom of Wolverhampton market is eighteen ounces to the pound of butter, one hundred and twenty pounds to the hundred of cheese, nine gallons and a half to the bushel of barley, oats, beans, and pease; and seventy-two pounds to the bushel of wheat, while that of other markets in the county varies, some being more and some less.
However, while to government and to reformers alike this seemed like anarchy, the author of the report, William Pitt, saw no reason to be concerned: ‘Much complaint has been made of this variation, and much has been said about a ⁵ Car. II, Cap. VIII. See also, Car. II, Cap. XII (2). ⁶ Gloucestershire CRO, D214/b10/4, draft petition drawn up by Gloucester Justices in 1709; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxix (1769), 51. ⁷ John Monk, A General View of the Agriculture of Leicestershire (1794), 54; W. Pitt, A General View of the Agriculture of Leicestershire (1809), 321. ⁸ Carl J. Griffin, ‘As Lated Tongues Bespoke’: Popular Protest in South-east England 1790–1840 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Bristol, 2002), 138. ⁹ Bath Chronicle, 26 December 1769. ¹⁰ Thomas Batchelor, A General View of the Agriculture of Bedfordshire (1808), 592. ¹¹ Gloucester Journal, 3 September 1810. ¹² Bath Journal, 22 September 1766.
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regulation of weights and measures, and obliging every person to sell by the statute or standard weight or measure; but I cannot think it a matter of much importance.’¹³ Pitt meant that, as markets clearly prospered without uniformity, heterogeneity did not matter. To the local consumer, however, preserving the known and trusted customary bushels was a matter of high importance. The Tetbury demonstration did not come out of the blue. It followed in the wake of a determined attempt the previous year by ‘several of the most eminent farmers’ to impose the Winchester measure. Second only to Cirencester in importance as a grain market in the region, Tetbury was increasingly caught up in a growing national market and the large Cotswold producers recognized the advantages in a common measure. However, in 1767 the millers, the principal local buyers, would have none of it, even when assured that the farmers would sell at a real cost reduction of 6d. per bushel. The Bristol press put this down to selfinterest, claiming, ‘so averse are they to have their Mysteries of their Gains known, that they bid defiance to the Gilded temptation, and declare that they will not buy a handful.’¹⁴ But nor would other local purchasers have anything to do with the Winchester bushel, distrusting these ‘eminent farmers’. Such men were not popular figures. When, in the extensive food riots of September 1766, a group of ‘regulators’ marched out to the town from Stroudwater, intent upon lowering the rapidly rising price of grain, they met with vigorous opposition from these farmers. One body (not large) went for Tetbury market where having seized a waggon load of wheat and bacon in order to sell it at their own price, they were opposed and some of them severely beat (with sticks and clubs only). One of the mob had his skull fractured and is since dead and it is a report that some of the others will not recover from their wounds.
The Stroud weavers were not amused. The following day a very much larger party returned to the town. Unopposed, they bought up all the cheese and bacon in the town at 3d. and 4d. a pound, respectively. Then they sought out the man who had fractured their colleague’s skull. He had fled but they found his father, a prominent farmer. He gave the mob money, and with five other farmers, undertook to publish a full apology for their ‘Cruel and Barbarous’ behaviour in the Gloucester Journal. Nine injured rioters were in fact each paid £1 in compensation.¹⁵ Local consumers shared the Stroud weavers’ suspicions that farmers were driving up prices to their own ends. The farmers were not long deterred. In early April 1768 they brought a case against the lords of the manor of Tetbury who, as trustees of the tolls, were legally responsible for the market ‘for not using in the public market a brass Winchester bushel’. They won the case and the lords of the ¹³ W. Pitt, General View of the Agriculture of the Country of Stafford (1796), 180–1. ¹⁴ Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 16 July 1767. ¹⁵ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 20 September 1766; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 September 1766; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 27 September 1766; Gloucester Journal, 6 October 1766.
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manor were fined.¹⁶ At the next market day, the people of Tetbury demonstrated their response. The ‘suspension’ of the ‘old venerable bushel’ from the church spire was directly aimed ‘to the great terror and amazement of the farmers’. It was a powerful symbolic communal warning not to threaten local market custom again. Tetbury was not the only place where resistance was active. In December 1768 a large crowd gathered in Tewkesbury marketplace and publicly burned Winchester bushels—‘little bushels’—in ‘the noblest bonfire that ever was seen in this borough’. Here too there were claims that the maltsters and bakers ‘bought by the large measure and sold by the small one’.¹⁷ In the crisis years of the 1790s, with food rocketing in price, hostility became more pronounced. A food rioting crowd at Salisbury vented their anger on William Dyke of Sycencot, ‘one of the largest farmers in the West of England’, attacking his coach and preventing him from pitching his grain in the market: on account of his being the ring-leader in what the poor called a conspiracy to lessen the size of the bushel and, at the same time, to keep up the price of corn. [Dyke] had been very instrumental in causing the little bushel, of the Winchester measure, of eight gallons, to be introduced generally in the county of Wilts, instead of the old bushel, which contained nine gallons, and in some instances ten gallons.¹⁸
When the North Devon Agricultural Society supported the introduction of the Winchester bushel at Bideford market in 1812, members were threatened: ‘Winter nights is not past therefore your person shall not go home alive.’¹⁹ Nor were these threats confined to the West. In Sussex, labourers formed an association to compel farmers to abandon attempts to introduce the ‘flat bushel’ and, when their meetings were stopped, they took to harassing those who persisted, ‘whooping and hallowing’ under their windows and ‘damning the little bushels’. One farmer was shot. Others were threatened that their ricks and houses would be fired.²⁰ When Lord Romney revived the sale of corn by the old bushel at Maidstone in 1796, his benevolence was widely applauded.²¹ The resistance to the ‘small bushel’ reveals much about the culture, values, and organization of the marketing of food in the eighteenth century and about the nature of authority/populace relations because, as E. P. Thompson notes, ‘The “relationship of people to food” involves systems of power, property and law.’²² Corn measures mattered, at they had done since the Middle Ages, since they were intricately bound up with the price of grain and hence the price of bread, the staple diet of the poor. Demand for bread was inelastic. When prices were low, ¹⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxviii (1768), 194. ¹⁷ Bath Journal, 19, 26 December 1768. ¹⁸ H. Hunt, The Memoirs of Henry Hunt Esq. Written by himself in his Majesty’s Jail at Ilchester (1820), 238. ¹⁹ HO 42/121, cited in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1968), 68. ²⁰ Griffin, ‘As Lated Tongues Bespoke’, 139. ²¹ Gentleman’s Magazine, lxvi (1796), 960. ²² E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991), 287.
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consumption did not reduce much, since money saved could be spent upon other more expensive supplementary foods such as meat. In times of grain shortages and high prices, consumers found it hard to switch to alternatives, such as potatoes. As Burnett notes, ‘when prices rose, labourers might eat the same quantity of bread, but cut out other items in their budgets; they might eat more bread to compensate for the loss of other items.’²³ At such times, commentators estimated, as much as half a labourer’s income might be spent upon bread.²⁴ Hay suggests that in ‘hard years perhaps 20 per cent of the population could not, unaided, have bought sufficient bread’, whereas ‘in a very hard year, 45 per cent of the entire population could be thrown into such destitution.’²⁵ Bread, therefore, was a commodity subject to considerable price fluctuations dependent upon the success of the harvest. This dependence was accentuated after the first three decades of the eighteenth century when, with bumper harvests, wheat prices tumbled and for the first time fine wheaten bread fell within the purchasing power of many labourers in the South and Midlands. Once adopted, there was marked reluctance to return to coarser rye or barley breads.²⁶ This ‘conservatism’ was decried by many writers who urged the poor to revert to cheaper foods, but the more perceptive, such as David Davies, noted that wheaten bread contained far more nourishment than did barley or rye bread and that coarser breads required a diet rich in milk and dairy products to make it palatable. With the collapse of local milk supplies following enclosure of the commons, Davies argued, a return to coarser breads was impracticable. Charles Smith, one of the best-informed commentators on the wheat market, estimated in 1766 that wheaten bread formed the main foodstuff for around two-thirds of the English population.²⁷ Recent studies of the corn and bread trade have largely confirmed this estimate.²⁸ The national picture, however, disguised the higher percentage of wheaten bread consumers in the southern half of the country, where most of the wheat crop was produced. North of a line from the Mersey to the Humber, wheat production gave way to rye and barley and here coarser breads predominated. Yet, even in Lancashire there is evidence that, as incomes rose with rapid industrialization, consumers in Manchester began to switch from local brown rye breads to white bread baked from grains imported from the South.²⁹ Since the wheat harvest was notoriously more volatile than that for other, hardier, grains, fluctuations in supply became increasingly critical.
²³ J. Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 (Routledge, 1989), 61. ²⁴ The diets collected by Revd David Davies and Sir F. M. Eden both suggested that rural and urban workers spent on average some 53% of their income on bread. Thompson, Customs in Common, 204 n. 3. ²⁵ D. Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, xcv (1982), 132. ²⁶ D. Davies, The Case of the Labourers in Husbandry (1795), 32–3. ²⁷ C. Smith, Three Tracts on the Corn-Trade and the Corn Laws (1766), 140. ²⁸ C. Petersen, Bread and the British Economy c. 1770–1870 (Scholar, 1995), 201. ²⁹ A. Booth, ‘Food Riots in the North-west of England, 1790–1801’, Past and Present, lxxvii (1977), 86.
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This growing dependency on the wheat harvest had major importance for the state, since it recognized that hungry Englishmen did not simply sit down and starve. They rioted, with increasing frequency in the seventeenth century, seizing food supplies and imposing their own brand of order upon the markets. Given the lack of local forces able to restrain such disorder, it was imperative that, in so far as it was possible, food markets should be regulated and bread prices managed with transparency in order that consumers should be convinced that adverse fluctuations in supply and price were natural phenomena and not acts of market manipulation inspired by human greed. Such regulation took two forms. The first was set out in the Assize of Bread, which provided a mechanism for the strict monitoring and regulation of the sale of the staple food.³⁰ This process had ancient roots but by the end of the seventeenth century the old Assize had generally fallen into desuetude. In 1709 it was revived and clarified. In every market, the clerk of the market was required to report the current price of a bushel of wheat to the magistrates. They, after adding a sum allowed to the baker for production, fixed the weight of the penny loaf in three categories, White (the best), Wheaten (the middle grade), and Household (the coarsest). They did this using a ready-reckoner provided for all justices’ use. The Assize of Bread was therefore intended to be simple and transparent, the setting of the standard loaf being a simple product of three known elements: the current price of wheat in the market; the allowance for the baker, which changed little across the century; and the number of loaves made per bushel, again a commonly verified element. In this way, it was assumed, consumers could be reassured that bakers had no opportunity to exploit their pivotal position in the market. Their actions were to be subject to careful scrutiny, their rewards being set as for servants of the community, not left free to be determined by market forces. The 1709 Assize was amended four times in the eighteenth century to take account of new developments in the market. Thus, as bakers increasingly came to use bought flour rather than purchasing grain and having it milled, new grades of regulation were included to allow for assessment of such loaves. Modifications to the Assize were also made in 1757 in an attempt to check the consumption of finer bread by abolishing the White category, though in fact they resulted in the opposite effect since in practice it led to an improvement in the quality of the middling wheaten bread. This act allowed magistrates to ignore the task of fixing the Assize where there was little commercial baking, though they were ordered to resume the process in times of unrest. For most urban markets, however, the Assize was regularly, and conscientiously, set throughout the eighteenth century. Such assiduous control reflected the real perception that failure to display regulation might well result in major crowd disturbances. This was particularly the case in London, the centre of government, where the revolutionary potential ³⁰ The best account of the development of the Assizes can be found in Petersen, Bread and the British Economy, ch. 4.
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of hungry and angry mobs on the rampage struck terror into even the most sanguine Whig or Tory. Lord Liverpool, for example, who had witnessed the taking of the Bastille, ‘constantly fretted lest hunger . . . should spark off a French-style revolution’.³¹ For this reason the regulation of Assize in London markets was more tightly maintained than anywhere.³² The second form of regulation concerned the marketing of grain and other foodstuffs in the marketplace itself. The conduct of markets and marketing practice was enmeshed in regulations that, enshrined in the Book of Orders, in the Common Law, and in local custom, stretched back well before the sixteenth century. This ‘paternalist model of marketing’, as E. P. Thompson described it, envisaged markets as essentially local exchanges and endeavoured to ensure that, as with the Assize of Bread, the process of retailing food was transparent and not liable to manipulation. These various injunctions ordered that food must be marketed near its place of origin, that all commodities must be ‘pitched’, that is, laid out for inspection prior to sale, and that all transactions must take place in the marketplace and be subject to scrutiny. For this reason, sale of food directly from the farm was strictly prohibited. Markets themselves were to be closely controlled, with fixed opening and closing times, which allowed specified periods for the smaller consumer to make their purchases before any larger deals took place, and transactions within them were to be monitored. Practices such as forestalling, buying up foods before they reached market; regrating, the purchase of a commodity in one market with the intention to sell it later at a second market but at higher prices; and engrossing, the buying up of large quantities with intent to monopolize the market, were all declared strictly illegal. Likewise, the purchase of standing crops or the sale of crops by sample, both of which enabled middlemen or ‘badgers’ to bypass the local market, was strictly proscribed. As the eighteenth century passed, the efficacy of these regulations was eroded. Nonetheless, this regulatory culture was widely known and accepted as the key underpinning of market culture. While force majeure drove the state towards the regulation of food markets, there were also widely accepted intellectual reasons justifying the close regulation of markets. These made up the underpinnings of a wider paternalist philosophy which justified the political predominance of the landed through their acceptance of the social obligation to protect the weaker members of the community from exploitation and extreme hunger. First and foremost there was the authority of the Bible. For a state which claimed to derive its sovereign power from the observation of Christian principles, this was a source that could not be ignored. The Old Testament in particular was full of injunctions on the rich to protect the food supply of the poor. These texts were elucidated at quarter sessions, preached from ³¹ Petersen, Bread and the British Economy, 97. ³² S. E. Brown, ‘ “A Just and Profitable Commerce”: Moral Economy and the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies, xxxii (1993).
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pulpits by clerics and from wayside chapels by itinerant evangelists in times of distress. Biblical precepts formed the core of many a dissertation on the subject of food marketing, and they were frequently reiterated by writers to the local press whenever scarcity occurred or, indeed, when threats to local corn measures were proposed. For example, ‘Pro Bono Publico’ reminded the readers of the Gloucester Journal that ‘ “He that witholdeth the corn the people shall curse him, but blessing shall fall on the head of him that selleth it.” Proverbs XI, 26.’³³ Voluminous popular pamphlets echoed these sentiments in various forms and to various audiences across the eighteenth century. It was such a commonplace that anyone seeking to argue in the first half of the century for an unfettered market and the removal of regulation would have found himself the recipient of scriptural refutation.³⁴ A second legitimating element was that of Natural Law. This philosophical system had developed increasing intellectual importance in the later seventeenth century, thanks to the writings of men such as Pufendorf, Grotius, and Hobbes. Natural Law advocates argued that mankind had developed through four stages: from hunting and gathering; through animal husbandry; to agriculture; and finally to commerce. Each previous stage, they asserted, had required new legal frameworks to manage society. The advent of the commercial age therefore also necessitated new forms of property rights. However, they recognized that the ancient entitlements of the poor could not be overridden, accepting that, as in previous centuries, every man had a right to subsistence. Man’s instinct for selfpreservation might, in times of dearth, lead him to ignore exclusive property rights and to seize the food he needed. Although clearly criminal, such actions were justified. Hobbes wrote, ‘When a man is destitute of food or other thing necessary for his life and cannot preserve himself any other way, but by some fact against the Law: as if in a great famine he take food by force, or stealth, which he cannot obtain for money nor charity . . . he is totally Excused.’³⁵ This view, paraphrased as ‘hunger will break down stone walls’, was echoed in numerous pamphlets and letters to the press. For example, a correspondent, ‘Scipio’, asked the readers of the Bath Journal during in the food riots of 1766: Must they [the poor] be forced, for the maintenance of their families, to a breach of the laws of common honesty, as well as those of the land, and suffer at the gallows for crimes the cruelty of their oppressors oblige them to commit? . . . shall not the blessings of Heaven, intended equally to all, to all be equitably administered? Self-preservation, the first law of nature, is above all human statutes.³⁶
How this might be achieved remained the source of debate. Some argued for a relatively free market but for the establishment of large granaries run by the state ³³ Gloucester Journal, 6 July, 28 April 1767. ³⁴ For an excellent discussion of such views and those in the following paragraph, see R. D. Sheldon, The Politics of Bread in Eighteenth-Century England: Debating the Subsistence Question (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1999), especially chs. 2 and 4. ³⁵ T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Penguin, 1968), 346. ³⁶ Bath Journal, 29 September 1766 (I am grateful to Richard Sheldon for pointing this letter out to me).
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or local authorities, which would ensure that supplies, even in times of dearth, were available for distribution to the needy. This model was widely used in France, though its success was open to doubt. Certainly, its ‘French’ character, smacking of powerful central government, predisposed most English thinkers to eschew it. The alternative, therefore, was a closely regulated market structure which guaranteed the security of food supply for the poor, reinforced by a poor law which provided a permanent safety net for the indigent and by Christian charity which would tide men through the worst. The idea that markets might be allowed to regulate themselves was regarded as wild and fanciful. The consequences, in terms of public order, were too dreadful to contemplate. This paternalist model, with its emphasis upon fairness and regulation, was, if not hostile to profit, certainly inimical towards those who placed personal profit maximization ahead of serving the community. In particular, it assumed the worst of dealers and middlemen who were seen as interposing an ‘unnatural’ element into the primarily local character of the market. They were singled out for restraint. In this, the legislative framework informed and echoed public opinion which only too readily suspected the larger dealers, and those large engrossing farmers who turned their backs upon the petty markets in favour of the growing national market, of seeking to manipulate market scarcities. Indeed, many attributed all scarcities to middlemen. To many consumers and gentlemen magistrates alike, the food crisis of 1756 was an artificial construct, brought about by the activities of large farmers and middlemen who were buying up grains to generate increased profits.³⁷ In 1766 a dealer complained that the old laws against forestalling are printed in every newspaper, and stuck up in every corner, by order of the justices, to intimidate the engrossers, against whom many murmurings are propogated. The common people are taught to entertain a very high opinion and reverence for these laws.³⁸
Suspicions that dealers were deliberately fomenting or taking advantage of scarcity were not without foundation. In the 1790s the rare survival of the business records of the large corn factoring firm of Jebbs of Slane shows how they did indeed seek with success to manipulate the market to boost profits, even in the face of apparently tight government controls.³⁹ Nor was distrust of middlemen confined to a ‘conservative’ or ignorant poor. Middling-sort consumers in Norwich, Bristol, and Oxford, as in other towns and cities, were only too ready to assume the hand of middlemen in every sudden price rise and unexplained commodity shortage. They were equally willing to take action against them, short of rioting.⁴⁰ Therefore, the great majority of consumers, not merely the poor, agreed that regulation of markets against such practices was an absolute necessity. ³⁷ See p. 115. ³⁸ Anon., Reflections on the present High Price of Provisions, and the Complaints and Disturbances arising therefrom (1766), 26–7, cited in Thompson, Customs in Common, 209. ³⁹ On food riots, see Chapters 5 and 9; R. Wells, ‘The Irish Famine of 1799–1801: Market Culture, Moral Economies and Social Protest’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest, 176–7. ⁴⁰ See chapters by S. Renton, S. Poole, and W. Thwaites in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest.
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This consensus on the need to control markets and maintain them as essentially local exchanges gave rise to a theatre of market regulation which both satisfied consumers and re-emphasized paternal authority. For example, justices were charged that they should ‘once a year over-look the weights and measures, and break and burn such as are defective, and punish the offenders’.⁴¹ Many undertook such checks far more often and their execution of this duty was often turned into a public performance. This was the case in Coventry where the corporation, working through a large body of freemen, maintained a close regulatory regime.⁴² In 1753 the mayor of Bath very publicly ordered his officers to tour the market to test the weight of butter packs after complaints were received. A ‘great quantity’, found to be short weight, was confiscated and distributed free among the poor.⁴³ In July 1766 ‘a strict examination was made into the weights and measures of this city; when many persons were fined. And Thursday, a great number of gardeners’ measures were burnt in the market place.’⁴⁴ Gloucestershire magistrates convicted forty-five petty dealers trading at Tewkesbury in 1808, finding 199 defective weights and balances.⁴⁵ Similar examples can be found across the country. Although it was in the main small traders and producers who were prosecuted, these actions emphasized the role the authorities were expected to play in maintaining honesty in the market. Such displays of market regulation became more frequent whenever grain shortages occurred or riots broke out. For example, in November 1755 the mayor of Bath issued a proclamation against ‘the great evils of regrating, forestalling and ingrossing’, setting out in detail how the city’s market would be conducted to protect consumers. The town crier would ring the bell at 9 a.m., and allow one hour for the poor to make their purchases. The market would close when he rang his bell at 11. The magistrates of Somerset issued a similar injunction to markets in their jurisdiction.⁴⁶ In 1766, a year that witnessed major food riots, John Pitt, land steward to Lord Hardwicke, complained to his employer: resolutions were agreed to at all the meetings that all buyings and sellings of provisions but in open market were illegal. . . . you could not buy an egg or a pound of butter but at the tingling of a bell and on a particular spot.⁴⁷
At such times associations were often set up to prosecute market offences, such as that established in Gloucester in 1767 for ‘procuring informations, and carrying ⁴¹ W. Sheppard, Of the Office of the Clerk of the Marker, of Weights & Measures, and of the Laws of Provision for Man and Beast, for Bread, Wine, Beer, Meal, etc. (London, 1665), 110. ⁴² A. J. Randall, A. Charlesworth, et al., ‘Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest, 16. ⁴³ Bath Journal, 19 March 1753. For similar examples, see A. D. Leadley, ‘Some Villains of the Eighteenth-Century Market Place’, in J. Rule (ed.), Outside the Law: Studies in Crime and Order 1650–1850 (Exeter: Exeter Papers in Economic History no. 15, 1982). ⁴⁴ Bath Chronicle, 10 July 1766. ⁴⁵ Gloucester Journal, 1 February 1808. ⁴⁶ Bath Journal, 3 November 1755; Somerset CRO, D/B/bw 2024, Orders of the Magistrates, 16 November 1755. ⁴⁷ BL, Hardwicke Mss., Add. Mss. 35,607, Pitt to Hardwicke, 21 December 1766.
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on prosecutions, against all persons concerned in any of the offences of Forestalling, Ingrossing and Regrating’.⁴⁸ The government itself gave support to such overt measures of regulation by issuing proclamations against the same offences, thereby increasing public perceptions that the villains of the piece were indeed middlemen and regrating farmers. Pressure might be put on farmers to comply with the laws in more subtle ways, as a salutary story reported in the Gloucester Journal showed: Two Gentlemen by accident passing a vessel just arrived here from abroad, laden with Wheat, saw several people looking upon a sample of it, among whom was a Farmer, whom one of the Gentlemen accosted with. ‘How do you do Farmer?’ ‘Pretty Well, I thank you Sir.’ ‘Pray is your name _?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘Do you not live at _in Wilts?’ ‘Yes Sir.’ ‘And pray what brought you here farmer?’ ‘Why Sir to buy a little corn for our family; we must not starve Sir.’ The gentleman replied. ‘Look you Farmer, if you do not go immediately about your business, I will proclaim you to the Populace, what first I will whisper in your ear—Within these few days I passed by your Barton, where I saw several ricks of Wheat, and some three years old.’ The farmer took the Gentleman’s advice and walked off.⁴⁹
The editor of the paper, Robert Raikes, a very firm Tory philanthropist, asked rhetorically: ‘Would not a good regulation of this Free Market be of infinite use to prevent Ingrossers, Forestallers and others, from enhancing the price of every necessary article, so prejudicial to the City in General, and the industrial Poor in Particular?’ He was convinced that ‘the Connivances of Officers properly appointed’ lay behind what he assumed were deliberate abuses of the law.⁵⁰ However, while both the law and custom dictated that the market should be first and foremost a local place of exchange, neither could effectively resist the economic imperative of an expanding market. This ‘growth of a national market’ was relatively slow paced in the first half of the eighteenth century since the transport infrastructure was too poor to make large-scale movements simple.⁵¹ However, the canalization of rivers, turnpikes, and then canals brought steady changes. These were most quickly felt in the grain market where water-borne transport massively reduced costs⁵² and opened up new regions. There had, since medieval times, been a ‘national’ market of sorts in grain focused upon London, which had always needed to be supplied with bread, while London merchants had long shipped grains to Europe when profits were to be made. In the seventeenth century in times of harvest failure, the pull of London had had negative impacts upon grain markets in East Anglia and the West of England, resulting in food riots.⁵³ But, as the pace of both population and economic growth accelerated into ⁴⁸ Gloucester Journal, 2 May 1767. ⁴⁹ Ibid., 27 June 1767. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 26 September 1767. ⁵¹ J. A. Chartres, ‘Market Integration and Agricultural Output in Seventeenth-, Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’, Agricultural History Review, xliii (1996). ⁵² Petersen notes that in 1796 the relative costs for transporting a 280-lb sack of flour from Reading to London was 6d. by river as against 4s. 6d. by road. Petersen, Bread and the British Economy, 150. ⁵³ A. Charlesworth, An Atlas of Rural Protest (Croom Helm, 1983), 72–82.
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the eighteenth century, increasing quantities of grains began to be moved around the country. The major market remained London, its ravenous appetite for grain continuing to grow throughout the century. However, the bounty system, introduced in the 1680s to keep up the price of English corn by assisting its export, developed from the 1720s into a major influence in opening up new and often lucrative markets on the Continent. This resulted in growing shipments of grain, not only from London but, increasingly, from provincial ports.⁵⁴ From the second quarter of the century, industrializing regions such as the Midlands and southern Lancashire also began to exert a new pull on grain stocks. Market integration helped to engender a ‘consumer revolution’, albeit one that was enjoyed principally by the middling sort. Certainly, had the national grain market not developed as it did in the eighteenth century, the rapidly rising urban populations, such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester, would have suffered increasingly frequent dearth. This rise of a national market was not welcomed by many old-fashioned Tories who saw, correctly, that it would usher in a market-oriented society which would undermine localism and community. Contemporaries, used only to local or regional markets, became increasingly alarmed as grain prices, taking their cue from the large London grain market in Bear Quay, and later at Mark Lane, began inexorably to rise. However, this enlarging market brought advantages for those large farmers and landlords who could now sell their grain in large quantities onto a wider stage. For landlords in those regions where surpluses of grain had kept prices low in the 1720s and early 1730s, this opportunity was particularly welcome since rising prices would increase tenant incomes and thereby fund rising rentals. Much gentry interest in turnpikes, and later in canals, in the south of England stemmed from their desire to have a share of the lucrative London and international markets for grain. The prospect of increased rentals also encouraged landlords to engross farms, the aggregation of tenancies into large units that might then be let at significantly increased rent to men of capital who could develop market agriculture. Their size gave such producers very considerable market power. ‘A farmer who rents £1000 per annum is master of all the markets within reach. A few of these will, by withholding the corn, raise the price at any time to what pitch they please,’ reported James Montague from Chippenham in 1766.⁵⁵ The rise of the national market enhanced the market power of large-scale dealers and middlemen. Their ability to stockpile grain and switch it from market to market secured supply for the great urban areas, but it also made food dearer in many regions where formerly there had been food surpluses. Such dealers saw ⁵⁴ On grain exports, see D. Ormrod, English Grain Exports and the Structure of Agrarian Capitalism 1700–1760 (Hull, 1985). ⁵⁵ James Montague to Shelburne, 30 October 1766, Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1766–1769 (London, 1897), 91.
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little attraction in purchasing small and uncertain quantities in minor markets, preferring to contract for large loads direct from the producer or even from the field. To old Tories and paternalists this process of deliberate flouting of the laws on marketing was enraging and pamphlets continued to echo their demands that the corn trade should be more tightly regulated on the old tried and trusted lines. In places there were attempts to maintain the old pitching market through an active campaign of regulation and prosecution. Yet the economic pressure of profit was continually undermining the old model. Sale by sample increased everywhere and, as it did, market tolls fell and markets lost their vitality, depending increasingly upon the small farmers whose meagre stocks were not worthwhile forestalling. The complaints came first from the markets around London. Defoe described the impact of the developing national market on Sussex in 1724: Some money’d men of Chichester, Emsworth, and other places adjacent, have joined their stocks together built large granaries near the Crook, where the vessels come up, and here they buy and lay up all the corn which the country on that side can spare; and having good mills in the neighbourhood, they grind and dress the corn, and send it to London in the meal about by Long Sea, as they call it . . . It is true, this is a great lessening to Farnham Market, but that is of no consideration in the case; for if the market in London is supply’d, the coming by sea from Chichester is every jot as much a publick good, as the encouraging of Farnham Market.⁵⁶
Such macroeconomic views may not have coincided with those of regular market users at Farnham. A pamphleteer lamented the decline of markets in the region in 1718: ‘where in the memory of many inhabitants, there used to come upon a day . . . in some boroughs, four hundred loads of corn, now grass grows in the market-place.’ His title, An Essay to prove that Regrators, Engrossers, Forestallers, Hawkers and Jobbers of Corn, Cattle, and other Marketable Goods are Destructive of Trade, Oppressors to the Poor, and a Common Nuisance to the Kingdom in General, left the prospective purchaser in little doubt about the contents.⁵⁷ In 1733 petitioners from Haselmere complained that middlemen had ‘secretly bought up great quantities of corn by small samples, refusing to buy such as hath been pitch’d in open market’, and had thereby engrossed the trade.⁵⁸ By mid-century the practice was increasingly widespread in the West of England and the Midlands. Wendy Thwaites notes that even in the large and important Oxford grain market,
⁵⁶ D. Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1720; 1928 edn., J. M. Dent and Son), i. 135. Farnham had at one time attracted ‘eleven hundred teams of horses, all drawing wagons or carts, loaden with wheat’ to its market: p 142. ⁵⁷ An Essay to prove that Regrators, Engrossers, Forestallers, Hawkers and Jobbers of Corn, Cattle, and other Marketable Goods are Destructive of Trade, Oppressors to the Poor, and a Common Nuisance to the Kingdom in General (1718), 1. ⁵⁸ E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, l (1971), 85.
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where, due to its control by the university, the old mechanisms and measures were maintained up to the 1790s, sale by sample was increasingly taking place.⁵⁹ Such practices were resisted. A riot ensued in June 1757 when the crowd found a wagon of wheat ‘that was suspected to have been bought by sample, and only brought to the market to save appearances’.⁶⁰ Markets in the Vale of Evesham in 1756 likewise were feeling the effects of sample selling where ‘wretches, who ten years ago were not worth a load of corn,’ were ‘buying in a clandestine manner, 40 to 50 loads on a market day, and sending it privately down the water.’⁶¹ By 1766 Chippenham’s market was likewise being engrossed. James Montague noted that the high price of wheat resulted ‘not because of scarcity, but confederacy’. The large farmers effectively bypassed the local markets by direct deals with the middlemen or ‘jobbers, the most pestiferous vermin that ever infested the kingdom’. He himself sent to market for a quarter of wheat, and though there were many loads there, and it was soon after the market bell rang, wherever his agent applied to, the answer was ‘ ’Tis sold’. So that, though . . . to avoid the penalty of the law, they bring it to market, yet the bargain is made before, and the market is but a farce.⁶²
Not everyone condemned the decline of the old pitching market. In the midst of the 1766 riots in the West of England, John Pitt, land steward to Lord Hardwicke, penned a powerful defence of the new market and its agents to his employer, who in paternal fashion, was instructing him to make his tenants release cheap grain for the local poor. I will observe your Lordship’s command with regard to your Lordship’s tenants, though I must take the liberty of observing it is against my judgement, for let the price of necessarys be what they will now, there is the greatest probability of their being much dearer before next harvest, and with how much more sparing hand corn is now delivered out, with so much greater equality will the price of provision be then to what it is now . . . an equal price of provision is the best thing for the poor. They proportion their industry to the accustomed supplies necessary for a livelyhood whilst a fluctuating price breeds riot and distress.
He dismissed claims that the middlemen, or badgers, had caused the shortage: in fact they are the friends on many occasions of the poor for though they prevent any commodities from becoming a drug, yet they never suffer it to get over dear, and by that very certainty of a market they occasion, wet up the industry of the farmer, who otherwise might be deterred from raising wheat what he could not be sure of disposing of to advantage, and the scheme of the factor promotes the labour of the poor.⁶³ ⁵⁹ W. Thwaites, ‘The Corn Market and Economic Change: Oxford in the Eighteenth Century’, Midland History, xvi (1991), 108–9. ⁶⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvii (1757), 286. ⁶¹ Ibid., xxvi (1756), 557. ⁶² James Montague to Shelburne, 30 October 1766, Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1766–1769 (London, 1897), 91. ⁶³ BL, Hardwicke Mss., Add. Mss. 35,607, Pitt to Hardwicke, 21, 20 December 1766.
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Pitt was a shrewd observer of the developments in the market, anticipating the argument which Adam Smith and the political economists would advance ten years later. But his iconoclasm was far from popular in 1766. Nor were the complaints of ‘A Farmer’ who wrote to the Gloucester Journal that year likely to be heard in sympathy. ‘Are we farmers the only people to be grudged the profits of honest labour?’ he exclaimed, in a rare defence of the farmers’ right to maximize profits. Farmers knew, he said, that the European crop was deficient and they expected good returns for their harvest. Yet not only had the government banned exports, but now farmers were barred from selling grain at ‘sensible’ prices on the home market. He saw this as a deliberate policy to featherbed manufacturers: ‘But oh the manufacturers! They are to be feared and must have bread at a cheap rate!’⁶⁴ Such sentiments no doubt struck a chord with other farmers, but, in the middle of a food crisis, few were prepared to assert them publicly. It was in this context that we may more clearly locate the tensions manifested in Tetbury and elsewhere in the 1760s in the face of the attempts to introduce the Winchester bushel there. The fact that this campaign was strongly supported by the ‘eminent farmers’ merely served to alert popular suspicions. Consumers understood and trusted local measures, whereas everything about the Winchester measure challenged their expectations. For example, in the West, as in many regions, consumers demanded their measures heaped, not ‘flat’ as the law demanded. Such generosity of measure reflected both biblical injunctions and popular suspicions of dealers. Market culture was intolerant of meanness in vendors, a fact reflected in the baker’s dozen of thirteen, which emphasized the importance accorded to provision of full value and more.⁶⁵ The additional allowance reflected what consumers saw as goodwill and a guarantee in case the measure proved in some ways deficient. Many local bushels therefore exceeded their nominal capacity. For example, all the measures used in the Wolverhampton market were larger than their nominal value. This was often not taken into account when conversions to the Winchester measure were undertaken, an important issue for all consumers since the Assize of Bread was set according to multipliers all predicated upon the Winchester measure. In Somerset in 1794 it was noted: The calculation, in respect to the comparative price between the old and the new measure, was formed on the difference between eight and nine gallons, but this is erroneous; the old measure of the county was not less than nine gallons and a half, and in some instances, ten gallons, so that the buyer gives seven or eight per cent. more than he ought to give. ⁶⁴ Gloucester Journal, 8 December 1766. ⁶⁵ For example, purchasers in Wellington, Somerset, market in 1812 were so angered when a market woman bit off part of a potato in order exactly to make up the weight of a pound of potatoes that they clubbed together and hired the crier to publicize what she had done. The cost of this action, when, at a time of extraordinary prices, budgets were desperately stretched, would have been significant, but the heinousness of the offence clearly merited formalized community censure. Bath Journal, 27 August 1812.
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The change therefore worked ‘to the great benefit of the seller, and the great loss of the purchaser’.⁶⁶ Dealers and large farmers complained about the disadvantages in having to be constantly working across different ‘currencies’ from market to market, though in fact a series of ready-reckoners, which easily converted local measures into their Winchester equivalents, were available.⁶⁷ However, there were also advantages in such conversions in that it was possible to make profits within transactions. William Marshall, noting the failure of Leicestershire markets to impose the Winchester standard, wondered whether this was due to ‘the obstinacy of custom, right or wrong? Or have buyers (corn dealers, maltsters, and innkeepers) an interest in purchasing by one measure and selling by another? Their profits, by this complex mode of dealing, being the more difficult to ascertain.’⁶⁸ Here he hit the nail on the head. A critic of the way mealmen manipulated Surrey markets noted in 1734 that they, not being contented to take the market bushel, fix the price of corn on the farmers and the measure too; for they oblige the farmers to sell them so much corn for a bushel as weighs seventy-two pounds, which generally increases their measure to five bushels the sack, whereas formerly a sack held only four bushels; and they resell it again to the poor at fifty-six pounds only the bushel.⁶⁹
Recognition of the ways in which the ‘small bushel’ might be used by dealers therefore increased the popular hostility to the Winchester measure and to those who tried to implement it. It was not only consumers who were reluctant to move away from customary corn measures. Although it was the bench who were charged by the state and by the sessions to implement the proclamations demanding the imposition of the Winchester measure, many were far from zealous in the process. In part this reflected a lack of interest in standardizing measures. Justices reasoned that markets seemed to have got along perfectly well in the old ways without adopting the measure and therefore saw little to be gained from seeking to coerce vendors and consumers to change their ways, particularly when such a change was clearly unpopular. No doubt many also noted from their well-thumbed copies of Burn’s The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer that, although statute law overrode local customs in most cases, this did not necessarily apply in the case of corn measures: ‘the custom of the place is to be observed, if it be a custom beyond all memory, and used without any visible interruption.’⁷⁰ The civic authorities in Gloucester got round the problem by adopting a practice that may have been common. At the ⁶⁶ J. Billingsley, A General View of the Agriculture in the County of Somerset (London, 1794), 188–9. ⁶⁷ An example of this was John Hewitt’s The Corn Dealer’s Assistant (London, 1736). ⁶⁸ W. Marshall, The Review and Abstracts of the County Reports to the Board of Agriculture (1815), iv. 208. ⁶⁹ Cited in E. Lipson, The Economic History of England (London: A. and C. Black, 1931), ii. 422. ⁷⁰ R. Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer (14th edn., 1780), i. 408.
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annual regulation of market measures, the jury forcefully stuffed the brass exchequer bushel to the brim and then slowly poured the contents into their larger customary nine-gallon bushel. If this was done carefully, the grains filled the larger measure, thus granting it legitimacy, and this larger measure was then maintained as the standard for the market.⁷¹ Other justices were more forceful in their defence of the customary measures. At Tewkesbury in 1769 the magistrates, pressed by the sessions to enforce the Winchester measure, apparently complied when they insisted that the farmers, who had been clamouring for the abolition of the larger customary measure, sell all stocks in the ‘little bushels’. However, they also reminded the large farmers of a promise that they had made to the sessions earlier that they would in consequence lower their prices to those current in the London market. Since the local price was then higher, not one farmer turned up to pitch wheat for sale. The matter was allowed to drop once more.⁷² The failure of the local justices to force through compliance indicates the persistence of the old values of the paternal marketing system. A mixture of conservativism, localism, and suspicion of middlemen informed their reluctance to act, as did fears of provoking protests. The opponents of standardization played upon these old prejudices. In 1767 a Bristol Journal correspondent reminded readers of biblical injunctions on the subject of weights and measures: A Demure old farmer was observing at Gloster, that he was afraid that Bakers and MealMen never read their Bible; but as they always read the newspapers, he desired that they might be given the following texts of Scripture: ‘Just Balances, Just Weights, a Just Ephah, and a Just Hin shall ye have.’ Levit. XIX, 36. ‘Divers weights and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord.’ Prov. XX, 10.⁷³
An advertisement in the Gloucester Journal meanwhile sarcastically noted that ‘a number of public spirited and generous farmers have lately entered into a confederacy for the good of the poor, to bring less measure to Gloucester than is sold in any part of England, likewise to enhance the price of it, according to the old measure, 1s per bushel.’ It asked that ‘all farmers that are not tinctured with the leaven of unrighteousness’ should continue to patronize the market at Upton upon Severn and use ‘such lawful measures as sold by all honest men’.⁷⁴ The fact that these letters were published served to indicate to a wider public that the old bastions of paternal injunction and customary practice were not to be trifled with and that the ancient distrust of market speculators and monopolists remained deep seated. This was reflected in another story, which indirectly warned of punishment which might befall those who transgressed the social norms of market culture: Last week a large fire broke out and totally consumed a large stack of Wheat, 3 years old, consisting of nearly 1000 bushels, in the parish of Huntspill, Somerset. The owner thereof, ⁷¹ Gloucester Journal, 16 May 1732. ⁷³ Bristol Journal, 28 March 1767.
⁷² Bath Chronicle, 26 January 1769. ⁷⁴ Gloucester Journal, 6 July 1767.
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a rich farmer, thinking the price of 8s 4d per bushel at Bridgewater Market, Winchester measure, too little, it is said, was determined, if the poor starved (which was his common saying) not a handful should be sold for less than 10s.⁷⁵
Within two sentences, ancient suspicions of greedy, unchristian, Winchester bushel-selling agrarian capitalists were successfully invoked in a tale of legitimate retribution. That regional newspapers were prepared to publish such a story⁷⁶ about what was probably a major arson attack when they often shrank from reporting riots for fear of encouraging further outbreaks reflects the common distrust of the large farmer and dealer and support for that regulation of food markets which suffused popular culture in the eighteenth century. The extensive food riots of 1766 saw the old paternal regulatory model of marketing fully invoked in almost all markets around the country, as we shall see. However, from this apparent high point, a sea change of opinion set in. In the aftermath of the disturbances, attention was turned to the lessons which might be learned from them. The failure of the government to manage the system of wheat exports effectively—after embargoing exports for six months, they had failed to reinstate the ban in September 1766, resulting in grain pouring out of the country just as the impact of a disastrous harvest were being felt on the home market⁷⁷— raised questions about the effectiveness of the bounty system that supported the export of ‘surplus’ British grain. Such questions alarmed the agricultural interest, which accorded the bounty supreme importance in maintaining the stability of the agrarian economy and served to sharpen their demands for freedom from marketing restrictions. Meanwhile, the difficulties experienced in many large towns and cities in securing a supply of grain at the height of the riots also raised questions about the impact of a paternal model that privileged the provisioning of the local market. Was the old paternal model appropriate for an increasingly urbanized country? William Dallaway, who as High Sheriff of Gloucestershire had played his ‘paternal’ part in regulating markets and in seeking to mediate and conciliate in the extensive riots in that county, raised both issues early in 1767, arguing that the corn laws needed review and that the laws against ‘forestalling, engrossing and badging’ should be repealed. Attempts to enforce these acts, ‘if executed with rigor would go near as to starve such a country as this’.⁷⁸ This debate had been running since the earlier food riots in 1756–7 but it was sharpened by the response to the deeper crisis of 1766. A heavy blow to the old paternal model came from a writer and economist named Smith. This one, however, was not Adam, whose own definitional statement on the corn trade would not be published for a further ten years, but Charles Smith, a large-scale ⁷⁵ Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 6 November 1767. ⁷⁶ The same story was reprinted in the Liverpool Chronicle, 3–10 December 1767: Sheldon, The Politics of Bread, 135. ⁷⁷ W. J. Shelton, English Hunger and Industrial Disorders (Macmillan, 1973), 42–3. ⁷⁸ Gloucester Journal, 16 February 1767.
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corn miller and dealer who owned several large mills in Barking and in Stepney. He was also well connected politically. His firm was actively involved in supplying the London market with grain and he had married into a wealthy distiller’s family. Unsurprisingly, he had little time for the old paternal regulatory model. Nevertheless, Charles Smith was essentially a pragmatist. He realized that the market for grain was changing as transportation problems eased and urban markets, principally London, grew. He recognized the pivotal role of middlemen in supplying the urban markets and maintaining exports and also saw that, for all its emphasis upon controlling the role of middlemen, the system was in fact extremely lax in this respect. He first came to prominence in 1758 when, in response to the riots of 1757, he published a short pamphlet which argued that the rise of a national market in corn was a fact and that efforts to pretend that the grain market remained localized, serving self-sufficient communities, merely compounded the problems of shortage. In that new national market, men with large capital reserves were required to ensure that corn was able to flow from market to market to the benefit of producer and consumer alike. A second pamphlet the following year cemented his reputation as a spokesman for a new sort of market economics in which regulation of the corn market was kept to a minimum.⁷⁹ His tracts were enthusiastically taken up by a new breed of radical Whig politician, most notably by Edmund Burke, who saw in them justification for expunging the, essentially Tory, paternalistic model from government policy. In 1767 these men succeeded in getting the Commons to establish a Select Committee to examine the problems of food supply experienced the previous year. This committee reported that the old system was breaking down under its own inconsistencies. It had, they claimed, failed to ensure the food supply to urban markets, principally because the implementation of the old regulations against middlemen had greatly reduced their scope to move corn from market to market: ‘the several laws relating to badgers, engrossers, forestallers, and regraters, by preventing the circulation of, and free trade in corn and other provisions, have been the means of raising the price thereof in many parts of this Kingdom.’ It was, paradoxically, only because of the inefficiency of this old regulatory model that a complete crisis had been averted. They recommended that the old statutes should be repealed.⁸⁰ Significantly, this attempted coup against the old regulatory model failed. From the provinces petitions flowed in, demanding not less but tighter regulation of middlemen, while in the Commons it was clear that few were willing to tamper with so long-established a policy.⁸¹ In the next five years harvests improved, ⁷⁹ They were published as C. Smith, Three Tracts on the Corn-Trade and Corn-Laws (London, 1766). ⁸⁰ Journal of the House of Commons, xxxi (1767), 275, 291. ⁸¹ D. Hay, ‘Moral Economy, Political Economy and the Law’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Conflict, Crowds and Authority (Macmillan, 2000), 96–7.
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markets returned to normality, and prices fell back from their peak. Indeed, for many landlords a period of steady prosperity seemed to beckon again. In these circumstances, with enclosure proceeding apace and the bounty system soaking up surplus grain from market, any need to make formal changes to the old model looked increasingly unimportant. However, when poor harvests in 1772–4 provoked riots first in Scotland and then in the counties of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, and Suffolk,⁸² each a long-term supplier to the London market, the proponents of free trade were ready. Arguing the dangers of failing to secure an adequate supply of grain for the London market, they succeeded in getting the resolutions of the 1767 committee formally read in the Commons and were granted leave to bring in a bill. Three of the original committee took a leading role in ensuring the passage of the new legislation, with Burke prominent throughout. This time the paternalist position was not contested, in part because many seemed to accept that the old system was flawed, in part because many seem not to have noticed what was going on. The resulting act⁸³ asserted confidently that the old laws had been ‘found by experience’ to have a ‘tendency to discourage the growth’ of food and to ‘enhance the price of the same’. As a result, the laws against forestalling, engrossing, and regrating were abolished and current prosecutions voided. The victory of the reformers, however, was not quite as complete as it appeared, since the old laws continued to remain offences under the common law until tested before the courts. As we shall see, the ghost of the old paternal model was to return to haunt the state in the later 1790s. The philosophical shift away from regulation was reinforced by the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. If Smith, C., had provided the practitioner’s justification for the switch, Smith, A., provided the intellectual body blow. In Book IV of his monumental work, Smith included a ‘digression concerning the corn trade’.⁸⁴ Regulation was unnecessary. Corn was ‘of all commodities the least liable to be engrossed or monopolised’ since the trade was so extensive, whereas the ‘dispersed situation’ of inland dealers, including farmers and bakers, ‘renders it altogether impossible for them to enter into general combination’. Regulation merely pandered to the ‘inferior ranks of people’ who, in times of scarcity, ‘impute their distress to the avarice of the corn merchant, who becomes the object of their hatred’. Their ‘fear of engrossing and forestalling may be compared to the popular terrors and suspicion of witchcraft.’ In fact, Smith argued, the activities of dealers and middlemen were essential to the proper workings of the food market for only through their efforts could the larger metropolitan districts be adequately ⁸² A. Charlesworth, An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain (Croom Helm, 1983), 92–4. ⁸³ 12 Geo III, c.7. ⁸⁴ A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776: Everyman edn., 1975, J. M. Dent and Sons), iv. 23–42. Indeed, Smith claimed, ‘a famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting by improper means to remedy the inconveniences of a dearth’: p. 26.
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supplied. All regulation and restriction, even in times of absolute dearth, was likely to prove disastrous: ‘The unlimited, unrestrained freedom of the corn trade, as it is the only effectual preventative of the miseries of a famine, so it is the best palliative of the inconveniences of a dearth.’⁸⁵ E. P. Thompson notes that Smith’s pronouncement on the corn trade increasingly ‘acquired oracular authority, and in each episode of scarcity . . . these were the arguments which politicians and administrators rehearsed’.⁸⁶ That said, these were not views that represented the responses of most gentlemen on the bench across the country, as their responses to dearth at the end of the century demonstrated. While they were by no means uniformly keen to uphold the old model, their distrust of middlemen was almost as deep-rooted as that of the crowd, even if, as landlords, they benefitted from their activities. Social snobbery and jealousy of corn jobbers’ apparent wealth mingled with paternal sympathy and sense of duty. Few, even in the last quarter of the century, shared the political economists’ opinion that the market was an agency in its own right and had an automatic tendency to self-clearing. Indeed, many thought such ideas were nonsense since, as Richard Sheldon notes, the concept of a reified market was ‘a radical one, simply unthinkable to the vast majority of the population who still believed that men ran markets and not the other way around’.⁸⁷ The gentry also well knew that in the event of the ‘inconvenience of a dearth’—the very language smacking of the polite academic salon rather than the harsh realities of impending starvation—the crowd would find little consolation in the political economy of laissez-faire or comfort in the Panglossian assertion that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market would produce the best outcome in the best of all possible worlds. Nor would they be impressed with Smith’s assertion that the best way to ration short supply was by price, even if those prices might well exceed the capacity of labourers’ purses. The militant poor would do what they had always done: riot. And the justices would continue to be at the sharp end of crowd control. ⁸⁵ Smith, Wealth of Nations, 25, 27, 34, 27. ⁸⁷ Sheldon, The Politics of Bread, 37.
⁸⁶ Thompson, Customs in Common, 279.
5 Setting the Price: Food Riots before 1790 In the autumn of 1766, a series of extensive and protracted food riots swept across a large swathe of southern England. Domestic harvests had been poor since 1763 and wheat, and therefore bread, prices had stayed high. A disastrous harvest on the Continent in 1765 raised them higher still as already deficient stocks were drawn across the Channel. In late 1765 and into the spring of 1766 sporadic violence broke out at south coast ports when crowds forcibly resisted the exportation of grain.¹ Inland, too, crowds protested against the movement of food stocks. A ‘mob of near five hundred people assembled at Limpley Stoke, near Bradfordon-Avon, in March and stopped a wagon which they supposed full of flour for exportation.’ The load proved to be malt and was allowed to continue, but the report noted: The common people in that neighbourhood stop almost every wagon that passes the road (especially if going towards Bristol) in order to examine whether it is loaded with wheat or with meal—being resolved, they say, to seize everything of that kind to prevent it from being exported, or rather, as they call it, transported.²
Tension remained high since the economy continued to be depressed, and wages low. The War Office was well aware of the danger and notified officers in the field: ‘Poor men out of employment, especially when they are in large numbers, generally grow riotous and too often are above the management of the civil magistrates unassisted by military force.’³ The warning proved prescient. An embargo on the export of wheat had been imposed in February by the government in an attempt to stabilize price fluctuations and reassure consumers.⁴ It proved only marginally effective and market confidence was not restored until the prospects for the new harvest appeared favourable. The summer sun shone and the grain ripened. However, farmers and dealers recognized that, damaged by ¹ For example, at Lyme Regis in Dorset a crowd of over 600 prevented corn being exported while at Micheldelver in Hampshire a mob burned several granaries and threatened barges loaded with corn on the river at Winchester. WO 5/54, Marching Orders, f. 47; Gloucester Journal, 20 January 1766. ² Bath Chronicle, 14 March 1766. The crowd also forced the sale of butter, cheese, and bacon at reduced prices in the market. ³ WO 40/17, unnumbered papers, 1802 (c), riots 1766–1802; entry of riot orders, 22, 28, and 29 January 1766; Barrington to officer in command, Wells, n.d. ⁴ 6 Geo. III, c. 1,3,4,5.
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wet and cold weather in the late spring and early summer, the new crop would prove deficient. In the end it yielded only two-thirds of an average crop and was of poor quality. In these circumstances, the failure of Parliament to renew the embargo on export before its recess for the summer proved a fatal oversight. Merchants, knowing it would lapse on 26 August and anticipating large profits from overseas, sought to buy up what remained of the old stock. Prices therefore fluctuated wildly. In early August new riots against the movement of grain broke out in Dorset, Devon, and Berkshire. They were but the prelude to the main act. The gathering of the harvest in September, a time when prices generally fell, saw no downward movement but increasingly acute shortages, as new grain was bought up and put into granaries. Food riots of hitherto unprecedented dimensions erupted across the country. From the second week in September, the minor fracas that had been taking place in many local markets⁵ suddenly turned into a wave of extended rioting that swept the Midlands, the south-west, central southern England, and East Anglia, disrupting towns from Exeter to Norwich and from Salisbury to Nottingham. Those in Berkshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and Norfolk proved particularly difficult to contain.⁶ Let us take one detailed example. On 16 September riots broke out in Wiltshire. At the large Salisbury grain market, ‘a great number of the poor began to be very outrageous on account of the high price of wheat which then sold from 6s.6d to 8s per bushel.’ They seized the farmers’ sacks and sold the contents at between 5s. and 5s. 6d., returning the cash and the empty sacks to their owners. They next turned their attention to the ‘town mill’ at Fisherton, where they broke in, looking for hoarded grain. In the ‘bolting part’, they also found ‘ground chalk, lime and horse beans’. Angered, the crowd smashed all the gear.⁷ Such finds alerted others in the county to similar malpractice and some seven or eight bolting mills thereafter were destroyed.⁸ The two weeks that followed saw a confused trail of riot and destruction across the industrial and northern areas of the county, as mobs spread from market to ⁵ For example, on 7 August a crowd at Newbury had seized meat, bacon, eggs, and butter and had then attacked local mills, while on 28 August the crowd at Birmingham had forced price reductions in the butter market: Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 14 August, 11 September 1766. ⁶ The main published study of these disorders is W. J. Shelton, English Hunger and Industrial Disorders: A Study of Social Conflict during the First Decade of George III’s Reign (Macmillan, 1973). The map on p. 23 shows that twenty-five English counties experienced food riots in 1766. The most comprehensive study of the riots is D. E.Williams, English Hunger Riots in 1766 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, 1978). ⁷ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 22 September 1766; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 September 1766; BL, Hardwicke Mss, Add. Mss. 35,607, Harris to Hardwicke, 3 October 1766. The rioters also took over the butter market where they forced the vendors to sell at 6d. a pound, not the 8d. asked. Such riots had been anticipated, and the town was very well provided with troops, with no fewer than nine companies of foot garrisoned there. Their presence had no effect. ⁸ Annual Register (1766), 138. Bolting mills, a mid-eighteenth-century innovation, enabled the production of particularly fine white wheaten flour. The process was often susceptible to adulteration. Bolting mills had been attacked in Wiltshire in riots in 1756.
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mill and farm, seizing corn that they then generally sold at around 5s. a bushel. They also destroyed grain intended for ‘exportation’. Following the first riot in Salisbury, the local press, with one exception, observed a news blackout on these events. However, papers further afield felt under no such obligation. Aris’s Birmingham Gazette published a ‘letter from Wiltshire’, dated 21 September, which complained: We have nothing but insurrections of the poor for bread who are burning and pulling down the mills of those whom they know to be concerned in sending meal to Bristol for Exportation, a term become as shocking as that of a Bounty given to starve the poor . . . They touch no mills but such as deal to their oppression and carry off nothing: no plundering as yet.⁹
One event was widely reported. From Frome, a large crowd had marched to Trowbridge in order to pull down the corn dealers’ houses there: but some gentlemen interfering by giving them money and promising them their further assistance in lowering the price of provisions, they turned their course to Bradley near Trowbridge where they destroyed the mill and divided the corn: afterwards they went to Beckington in order to do the like, but they were resisted with firearms by the persons belonging to the mills and several were wounded which so exasperated the rest that they immediately made a fire with sticks and throwing firebrands onto the mills which were thatched soon burnt them to the ground.¹⁰
A second correspondent offered a more detailed, though inaccurate, account of the Beckington event. Mr P— yesterday endeavoured to disperse the poor assembled at the mill near him at B— by entreaties and offering them money which they refused, declaring that they wanted not that but bread for their children at a reasonable price. Being fired at from the mill, some innocent people were killed who were only bystanders and others wounded: on which they set fire to the mill and left the miller for dead and killed one of Mr P’s tenants who assisted him.¹¹
Such reports are typical of the ‘richer’ contemporary evidence of such riots. However, our knowledge of these particular disorders is augmented by a most unusual source. One of the participants in the riot apparently wrote up an account of his part in the action and sent it to the Salisbury and Winchester Journal. Even more extraordinarily, they printed it. Self-styled ‘A Mobber’, his story merits attention. On Wednesday evening last I was alarmed by the sound of a horn and the huzza of a multitude. I enquired the meaning of it and found a mob was going to pull down Bradley mill as they heard the miller dealt in corn and was a jobber in many other necessaries of life ⁹ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 September 1766. ¹⁰ Ibid. ¹¹ Ibid., 22 September 1766. The story was also recorded in the Annual Register, ix (1766), 138. The murder claim proved false: no charges for murder were brought against any rioter.
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and that it was partly the occasion of provisions being too dear . . . I got me a staff like the rest, joined them with a huzza, that they might not suspect me to be a spy. About 11 o’clock at night we were assembled and went in a body to the mill. We found nobody there, the owner being gone to Reading market; so to work we went, and got in and carried off all the flour, corn, ground chalk, horse beans, and lime, and in short destroyed everything. When we found such doings at this mill, we next day, one and all, agreed to examine a mill at Beckington. About 12 o’clock next day we all assembled on Road Heath¹² when a report was spread amongst us that the owner, Mr Carpenter, sent off great quantities of corn for exportation. This exasperated us the more; and we went in a body till within sight of the mill. We had not been long there until we heard the report of a gun and soon after that another, and we presently found that a few that were too eager were gone to the mill and were fired at by the people in the mill and reported to be killed. This provoked us greatly and there being one half of us that could use firearms and understood cannonading, we sent for some guns to the neighbouring villages and got possession of 15 pieces, but could only use 13, two being of no service; we also got ammunition, chose out the skilful marksmen and reconnoitred our ground; which done we sent our armed men under cover of as many more and took possesion of a thicket about fifty yards distant. You must know that a considerable number of us consisted of disciplined militia. Now the cannonading began to be smart on both sides for nearly three quarters of an hour: we had great numbers wounded but none mortal; one was shot by a bullet through his hat; another had the flap of his coat carried away; so we looked upon it that Providence walked on our side and that if we ventured never so great a hazard, we could not be much hurt; so when we found we could not gain possession by storming, we made a fire at some distance where we could not be discovered, and when properly lighted we carried it under cover of a party to set fire to the thatched hovel joining the mill having at the same time dispatched a messenger to our battery with our intention and desired they would support their fire as brisk as possible while we put our design into execution which was done without being discovered till on fire. This so greatly alarmed our enemies that they fled, some through the water, and some through our army and soon gave us possesion, so, having taken the flour and done what mischief we could, we dispersed home.¹³
What are we to make of this story? ‘A Mobber’ claimed to be ‘a country shopkeeper who at this juncture felt the badness of the times and, as I have just a sufficiency to support myself as a single man the remainder of my days, I have left off trade that I might not lose what I have hitherto obtained.’ One of the many angry responses to his letter suggested that this claim was scarcely credible. However, all subsequent correspondents appear to have taken his evidence at face value, seeing ‘A Mobber’ as a traitor to his propertied class, intent only on glamorizing the wicked actions of the mob in which he had played a notable part. ¹² Midway between Trowbridge and Frome. ¹³ There are certain discrepancies between the account provided by ‘A Mobber’ and that of the ‘gentleman arrived from Frome’, printed in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette. The gentleman categorically stated that the Frome men who marched on Trowbridge and thence to Bradley had assembled on Thursday morning, not Wednesday. The Trowbridge episode is not mentioned by ‘A Mobber’. It is, however, quite possible that ‘A Mobber’ lived in the Trowbridge area and came to hear of the projected assault on Bradley mill only after the local men had joined forces with the Frome men.
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Certainly his accounts of the events were not questioned.¹⁴ His use of language marked ‘A Mobber’ as an educated man and, if he did not participate in the actions he described, he was clearly privy to the first-hand accounts of someone who had. The references to the militia might suggest that he intended his account of the attack on Beckington mill to be read as a satirical warning on training the common people for war, but none of his critics picked up this point. It is, of course, possible that the editor himself was the author. Robert Raikes of the Gloucester Journal was not shy of ‘writing’ anonymously to his own paper. But the Salisbury Journal ’s editor normally preferred to play down riots.¹⁵ Indeed, he was widely attacked for printing the letter.¹⁶ On balance therefore, extraordinary though it may be, it seems that ‘A Mobber’ was indeed an eyewitness. His letter continued: Next morning which was Friday I heard the horns blow again which signified some other design that was to be executed, and fatigued as I was, I was willing to see what execution more was to be done, so I joined the main body about 12 at night and were two hours in gathering altogether and at about three in the morning we marched to Farmer ——, a famous cheese jobber of Ashton; he bought up the cheese as soon as made from our farmers. We found some cheese on him but no great quantity, he having secured it, as we thought, before we came; from thence we went to Westbury after another cheese jobber who told us we were welcome to what cheese we pleased; and gave a hogshead of strong beer, so we took about seven hundred [weight] and after being promised he would never more job in cheese we proceeded to examine some of the petty bolting mills, and finding so much bad materials for making bread that we resolved to destroy as many as we could. Now here I own I lent a hand myself and we did before night destroy seven of them: their use we looked upon was chiefly to mix bad ingredients; so when done we all went home for the beer kept up our spirit but all were very much fatigued.
Evidence from the Special Assizes which followed these riots bore out his story. Thus, Edward Pearce and John Weston, Westbury labourers, were subsequently tried, and acquitted, for stealing large quantities of cheese from the houses of Samuel Whatley and Bristo Tilley in the town. Among the mills destroyed at Westbury was that of William Beer, which was ‘robbed’ of flour by the rioters. Sarah Pane, otherwise Walton, was sentenced to be publicly whipped for her part in this. Press reports confirmed the assaults on the mills. One miller had been fortunate to escape before the mob demolished his mill about him, one story claimed.¹⁷ ¹⁴ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 22, 29 September 1766; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 29 September, 6, 13 October 1766. ¹⁵ For example, the Gazette’s own account of the extensive disturbances in Salisbury itself was highly misleading, reporting only that ‘some of the farmers attending to their complaints [about the high price] and taking their distresses into consideration, supplied them with what they had left unsold at 5s: which in some measure put a stop to their clamour and prevented any mischief ensuing in the market’. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 22 September 1766. ¹⁶ Ibid. ¹⁷ Ibid.; KB, 8/75, Special Commission, Wiltshire, cases against Pearce, Weston, and Walton; Bath Chronicle, 18 December 1766.
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No further reports from ‘A Mobber’ appeared. Whether this was because he chose to curtail his promising career as riot correspondent, or because the editor chose to print no more of his dispatches, we shall never know.¹⁸ While ‘the battle of Beckington mill’ proves unusually well-reported, similar disturbances were far from rare. Indeed, Rudé estimated that as many as two out of every three disturbances in the eighteenth century were over food. Many proved short-lived local affairs, one-off incidents in the marketplace that were suppressed or managed without recourse to military force. But not infrequently, as in 1766, food riots swept across the country, smouldering and breaking out like brushwood fires to the alarm and dismay of the authorities. In the years following the Hanoverian succession, such outbreaks occurred in 1727–9, 1739–40, 1756–7, 1766–8, 1772–3, 1783, 1795–6, and 1799–1801. We shall be looking at the food riots of the 1790s in a later chapter. What this chapter sets out to examine is the character and interpretation of food riots in the years before the events in revolutionary France gave a new context to mass popular disorder. Any discussion of the character and motivations of food riots must perforce commence with Edward Thompson’s seminal study of the ‘moral economy of the English crowd’.¹⁹ In this, Thompson challenged the prevalent view that food riots were merely ‘rebellions of the belly’ or ‘the instinctive reaction of virility to hunger’, arguing that they were ‘a highly complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives’, and that the actions of the crowd ‘were informed by a belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs’. These rights derived from ‘the paternalist model of the marketing and manufacturing process’, a model which we examined in the previous chapter. Thompson argued that the crowd strongly supported and endorsed this model, believing that any infraction of its prescriptions directly threatened the security of their subsistence. When, in times of sharply rising prices or dearth, the crowd discovered or feared that they were being cheated, they were likely to respond by directly intervening in the marketplace, sometimes just seizing foods, sometimes setting the price, and sometimes deliberately punishing those whose actions they deemed hostile. In so acting, Thompson argued, the rioters believed that they had ‘justice’ on their side. They knew all about the laws forbidding forestalling, regrating, and engrossing and they expected magistrates to uphold them. However, if the justices failed in their duty, they showed no hesitancy in acting for themselves. Food riots, Thompson therefore argued, were characterized by a clear and deliberate value system which empowered mass action, giving rise to forms of popular protest that, from the viewpoint of the authorities, were both highly alarming and also, paradoxically, manageable, because, if the justices did take up their regulatory role, rioters could be persuaded to return to their work. ¹⁸ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 29 September 1766. ¹⁹ E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, l (1971).
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Thompson’s reinterpretation of food riots from blind mob reaction to purposive collective social action was widely welcomed. Indeed, it was the key thesis behind the ‘rescue’ of the study of popular protest from more simplistic notions of ‘hunger politics’, which once held sway. Not all historians, however, have been fully persuaded. They have challenged his interpretation of food riots as communal ‘statements’ informed by a set of moral parameters: were they not simply practical responses to need? And they have questioned how far the actions of the rioting crowd can be seen as an orderly pursuit of ‘justice’, however defined. Equally, Thompson’s neat paradigm of a ‘field of force’ of nicely balanced power relationships between food rioters and authorities, managed within a ‘theatre’ of concession and deference, has been criticized, with historians pointing to the very real threat to order which such riots posed and to the often draconian responses that they elicited.²⁰ It is worth examining these questions in connection with some examples drawn from across the earlier eighteenth century. Let us start with the riots in Wiltshire detailed above. The context for these disorders was one of high and rising prices. All historians agree that price was clearly a key factor in precipitating riot, and, as in 1766, the most sensitive price was that of grain, principally wheat, and hence flour, since, as we have noted, the price of bread was a vital matter for the labouring poor in the eighteenth century. However, though prices were important, it is clear that food riots were in no way an automatic response to them. Nor was there some price threshold beyond which disorder was likely to break out. Indeed, some periods of exceptionally high prices saw little in the way of rioting, whereas food riots occasionally broke out in times of declining or relatively low prices. Thus, after the extensive riots of September 1766, prices continued to rise into the winter without occasioning further protests. In part this was the consequence of the ferocious clamp down upon riotous districts, with large numbers of soldiers being retained there to maintain order. However, it was also partly due to the tighter management of food markets that followed the riots and that ensured that increasingly expensive supplies regularly reached consumers. Food rioters frequently claimed that they were starving. Williams has shown that food rioters were very hungry but it is equally clear that few rioters were completely without food.²¹ At Stockton in 1740, women who attacked a grain ship ²⁰ See, for example, D. E. Williams, ‘Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766’, Past and Present, civ (1984), 56–73; J. Stevenson, ‘The “Moral Economy” of the English Crowd: Myth and Reality’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985); J. Bohstedt, ‘The Moral Economy and the Discipline of Historical Context’, Journal of Social History, Winter (1992), 265–84; and J. Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy, the Politics of Provision and the “Invention” of the Food Riot Tradition in 1740’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Conflicts, Crowd and Authority (Macmillan, 2000), 55–92. Thompson responded with vigour to his critics in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991), ch. 5. ²¹ D. E. Williams, ‘Were Hunger Rioters really Hungry? Some Demographic Evidence’, Past and Present, lxxi (1976).
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‘swear they will dye before any corn shall be exported for that they had better be killed or hanged than starved’. Miners at Rhuddlan told a local magistrate that they were starving because ‘little corn was brought to the markets . . . and great quantities were sent from thence to Sea, which they were resolved to stop’.²² But Cornish authorities were keen to deny tinners’ claims that they were starving: ‘for many, nay it may be said, even most of those who carried off corn we are well informed either gave it away or disposed of it to any that would buy it for quarter price.’²³ And the leader of a delegation of Kingswood miners in 1740 admitted ‘that for his part he had good bread, good cheese, and good fat beef enough; but that there were hundreds of poor families starving around him.’²⁴ Moreover, food rioters frequently destroyed food that they seized. These were not the actions of starving people.²⁵ Modern observers of famines know only too well that starving peoples do not riot: they do not have the energy. Food riots were pre-emptive of starvation, not its consequence. If absolute price levels did not ‘trigger’ riots, neither, necessarily, did rapid price rises. Returns from Gloucester market for 1766 shows that prices began to rise in May from already high levels but then accelerated from mid-June into early August, both top and bottom prices rising by over two shillings, an increase of 33 per cent. However, prices then stabilized or fell slightly into the first week in September, the point at which food riots broke out in that county.²⁶ This pattern was not untypical. Consumers, both rich and poor, were well aware that prices fluctuated according to supply and to the marketing choices of individual farmers as to when to sell their crops. Both were principally determined by the previous harvest. All knew that if the harvest was poor, supplies thereafter would be short and prices would generally rise. Experience also taught consumers that the annual pattern of prices in the local market depended upon a series of variables. If the harvest was good, prices might be expected to be at or near to their lowest point in the month or so immediately after, since smaller farmers, in need of ready money to pay their rents at Michaelmas (29 September) would have to thrash out some of their grain for sale. Larger farmers would wait until prices moved up, which they generally did into the winter months. There was likely to be another dip towards Lady Day (25 March), the second rental payment day in the agrarian calendar.²⁷ Thereafter producers played an interesting game of market maximization, keeping one eye on their stocks and another on the growing crops in their fields. ²² Cited in Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy’, 64. ²³ SP Domestic, 36/4, Mayor of Falmouth to Duke of Newcastle, n.d. ²⁴ Gloucester Journal, 30 September, 7 October 1740. ²⁵ For example, at Newbury in 1766: Gloucester Journal, 11 August 1766; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvi (1766), 388. ²⁶ For an extended discussion of this pattern and the differences between the two prices recorded at markets, see A. J. Randall, ‘The Gloucestershire Food Riots of 1766’, Midland History, x (1985), 76–7. ²⁷ In the north of England different dates were customarily used for rent days: Martinmas (11 November) and Pentecost (seven weeks after Easter). Further research is required to see whether these, later, dates had an impact on the timing of food riots in the north.
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The prospect of a poor harvest would encourage those who could afford it to withhold stocks until after the harvest was gathered since prices then would rise. A well-stacked corn rick, standing upon staddle stones to keep out rats, could keep wheat in good condition for at least a further twelve months. The prospect of a bumper harvest, on the other hand, would encourage the farmer to get his remaining produce to market sooner to ensure that he did not lose its value. Prices in the summer months were therefore often erratic. Consumers, therefore, were well aware of the vagaries of the market economy within which they lived. No one expected food prices to be fixed at a given level, regardless of supply. They might well grumble at rising costs but they did not riot. What roused suspicions, and eventually disorder, were sudden and inexplicable price rises or shortages, especially when the overall price was high. As we have seen, consumers were ever-distrustful of the motives of middlemen. Given that mindset, it was easy to equate rapid price increases with dealer chicanery. That mindset was reinforced by two sources of information. Since the quality of the harvest touched all, newspapers throughout the eighteenth century reflected this major public interest in their pages. Readers were regularly updated upon the prospects of the harvest and its likely dimensions, if often with little accuracy. These reports shaped expectations. In 1766, for example, after raising widespread concerns about the consequences of the heavy rains and cold weather on the crop earlier in the summer, many papers were fooled by the August sun and the ripening grains in the fields into predicting a good harvest. Thus in early September a correspondent touring the central south-west reported to Aris’s Birmingham Journal that he had never seen a finer harvest²⁸ Such optimistic forecasts clashed head on with the reality of shortages and rising prices as the harvest started to be brought in. Consumers could also rely upon their own ears and eyes. Although most consumers, rich and poor, were divorced from agrarian production, many, even those living in urban areas, the largest cities apart, had links or dealings with the countryside. For example, many industrial workers traditionally left their trades in the autumn to find work, and some recreation, assisting getting the harvest in, while market day provided close social contact between the producer and the consumer.²⁹ As a result, the poor generally proved more knowledgeable of the location of stocks of food than the authorities, who took the word of the dealers and farmers.³⁰ News and rumours spread rapidly. When the Wiltshire ²⁸ Aris’s Birmingham Journal, 15 September 1766. There were many others making the same mistake. For example, the Gloucester Journal, 25 August 1766, warned forestalling farmers that ‘if bounty on export ends and the fine weather continues’, they would find they had lost their price. The Exeter Flying Post, 15 August 1766, likewise announced ‘that the fine weather has made such alteration to the crops in general that a larger quantity of all kinds of grains is expected to be obtained than has been known for a great number of years past.’ Similar misjudgements were apparent before earlier and later food riots. ²⁹ This was true, for example, of many textile workers in the Stroudwater valley who would leave their looms to work in the harvest across the Cotswolds. ³⁰ For example, see below, p. 116, the case of Coventry in October 1766.
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rioters in 1766 turned from attacking the corn dealers’ houses in Trowbridge, they marched to Bradley mill ‘as they heard the miller dealt in corn and was a jobber’, while Beckington mill was singled out because its owner, it was said, ‘sent off great quantities of corn for exportation’. If news of conspiracies against the consumer tended to be accepted, it was because the mindset of the moral economy had deep roots in wider popular culture. In times of stress, and with incomes stretched to their limits, there was a readiness to assume the worst. Most food riots had their origin in the marketplace. It was here that popular resentment and grumbling at rising prices was most likely to turn into mass action when prices suddenly rose, when supplies failed, or when consumers witnessed an apparently plentiful supply disappear before they had the chance to buy. Food riots often began with seemingly petty disagreements between vendors and purchasers. For example, early in the afternoon of Friday 12 September 1766, Mary Cooke, carrying sixteen dozen loaves for her employer, a Stroud baker, was attacked near Ruscombe by a crowd of women, led by Hester and Jane Pitt. All the loaves were seized. Such events were probably not unusual and were certainly rarely recorded.³¹ However, in the context of deepening crisis, they might well prove the prelude to far more extensive attacks. In Norwich the riots of September 1766 began when a ‘butter woman’ raised her price from 8d. to 9d. per pint. A crowd gathered and angrily began to throw butter and vegetables around the market. When the magistrates attempted to intervene, they were driven off. The assembled mob then proceeded to attack the nearest corn mill and bakers’ shops.³² At Exeter, disturbances began when a small group intercepted a cart carrying dry peas from the town. They forced the owner to come with them to meet the magistrates. The latter tried to explain to them that there was no legal impediment to the man’s actions. But now other groups started turning back wagons. By the evening crowds were touring the streets, seeking out hoarded food supplies, while the following days saw riots spread into the manufacturing towns and villages which surrounded the city.³³ At Oxford disturbances began when, contrary to assurances, a wagon laden with flour was discovered by a small group to be leaving the city at dead of night. Its contents were destroyed. The following day a large crowd assembled, forced their way into all the mills, and seized flour. It was taken to the marketplace and given away.³⁴ ³¹ In this case, the attack proved to be the first incident in a major series of disorder and the Pitts were duly charged. TS 11/1128, case against Hester and Jane Pitt; testimony of Mary Cooke; Gloucester Journal, 22 December 1766, 10 January 1767; KB 8/76, Special Commission, Gloucestershire, cases against the Pitts. ³² S. Renton, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Middling Sort in the 18th Century: The Case of Norwich in 1766 and 1767’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996), 115–36, 122–3. ³³ Exeter Evening Post, 26 September 1766. ³⁴ Salisbury and Winchester journal, 29 September 1766. See also W. Thwaites, ‘Oxford Food Riots: A Community and its Markets’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture, 147.
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The same pattern can be seen at Leicester. Disturbances here began when a local cheese factor attempted to remove a wagonload of cheese from the town, contrary to his earlier assurances and the advice of the magistrates. A woman stopped the cart. Other women then jumped on the wagon and grabbed cheeses. Alerted by the clamour, the magistrates, backed up by a troop of militia managed to get control of the situation. They agreed that the cheese should be sold in the market the next day at only 2d. per pound. However, now mobilized, the crowd started to search warehouses and inns for cheese. What they found was taken to the marketplace. The next day a crowd of ‘not less than 4000 people were assembled, who, regardless of all property, seized upon everything in their way’. Riots continued for several days.³⁵ At Kidderminster riots followed a minor argument over the cost of butter. While this was going on, a baker offered a higher price for a bag of wheat that had been on the point of being sold to two women, ‘on which the poor immediately became riotous and obliged the farmers to sell it at five shillings per bushel’. It proved to be the start of extensive disorders there.³⁶ Riots in Birmingham began when consumers assaulted some butter vendors who had raised their prices from 7d. to 10d. per pound. There was no logical reason to explain this increase and it was bitterly resented. Having seized the butter, the crowd sold it out at the old price and ‘very readily returned to the utmost farthing’ the money to the vendors. At the following market the crowd set about fixing prices more generally.³⁷ Not all food riots began serendipitously. In December 1756 ten Cornish miners reconnoitred the town of Padstow. Satisfied with what they saw, they sent word back to the mining districts. ‘Accordingly on Monday 6th about 5 or 6 hundred of them, with several women, and upwards of one hundred horses came into the town.’ They took most of the food in the town.³⁸ The 1766 riots in Berkshire began at Newbury on 7 August. A group had marched into the town early on market day, gathering numbers as they came, calling out ‘Come one and all to Newbury in a body to make the price of bread cheaper.’ And they all joined to the number of 50 with sticks and as they came into the town they gave 3 huzzas in order to raise a greater Mob and then paraded to the market place.
At first only the sellers of bacon, butter, eggs, and meat were targeted but before long bakers and then the town corn mill were singled out. Significant quantities of flour were taken. Finally, mills surrounding the town were visited and grain and flour either seized or destroyed. A newspaper account justified their actions, noting that ‘Two bakers of this town were enriching themselves apace’ by mixing good wheat with low grade material and selling it ‘at the infamous price it now bears, when lo! Destruction came upon them unawares from the hands of an ³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸
Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 15 September 1766. Ibid., 29 September 1766; Annual Register, 1766, 138; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvi (1766), 437. Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 11 September 1766; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 20 September 1766. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 22 December 1756.
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injured people’.³⁹ In Gloucestershire the riots clearly had a premeditated character. Dallaway reported: On Friday last a mob was raised in these parts by the blowing of horns and consisting entirely of the lowest of the population such as weavers, mechanics, labourers, prentice boys, etc., their numbers uncertain, not very great but if united not despicable. They have compelled many who were unwilling to join them and the same day committed many outrages at Stroud market by pilfering the market people’s commodities and insulting the bakers.
The mob then proceeded to a grist mill near the town and also to one in Painswick, at each ‘cutting open bags of flower and giving and carrying it away and destroying corn’.⁴⁰ This was but the start of a very extensive and highly organized series of disorders. At Malmesbury, ‘the mob rose and divided themselves into parties and threatened farmers in that neighbourhood that if they refused to sell their wheat at 5s. and their cheese at 21⁄2 d. they would serve themselves.’⁴¹ Disorder in the marketplace tended to ensure that subsequent markets were but thinly attended by farmers and vendors since they, not unreasonably, feared losing their goods. The Earl of Berkeley lamented ‘the scarcity of provision in the markets have caused a considerable insurrection . . . which still continues to increase.’ However, ‘The outrages they commit are of such a nature as to put almost an entire stop to all markets and trading in these parts.’⁴² There was therefore an inevitability that riots, where they continued, would spread outwards to other markets, to farms, and granaries. Thus the Gloucestershire rioters followed up their intervention in Stroud with a visit en masse to Gloucester: ‘a great number of weavers and others from the parish and neighbourhood of Stroud’ marched to the city, intending ‘to compel the farmers to sell their wheat at 5s. a bushel’. Forewarned, the city magistrates met them with a mixture of force and exhortation: ‘Some blows passed between the constables and the mob which occasioned their speedy dispersion.’⁴³ This pattern, of riots spreading out from the initial location like ripples in a pond, was found everywhere but in London. Thompson argued that the main characteristic of the food rioting crowd was price fixing. As we have seen, the Salisbury crowd in 1766 seized the farmers’ sacks and retailed their grain at between 5s. and 5s. 6d., a price that remained remarkably consistent in all price-fixing food riots up to the 1790s. However, other historians argue such behaviour was comparatively rare. Bohstedt argues that ‘the rioters of 1740 were more interested in seizing food than regulating markets.’⁴⁴ Williams, in ³⁹ TS 11/995/3707, evidence of Edward Titcomb; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 16 August 1766. ⁴⁰ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 17 September 1766. There is some scant evidence that the riots here in September followed earlier disorders in August. See A. H. John, ‘Miles Nightengale, Drysalter’, Economic History Review, xviii (1965), 161. ⁴¹ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvi (1766), 493. ⁴² PC 1/8/41, Berkeley to Conway, 18 September 1766. ⁴³ Ibid., Dallaway to Conway, 17 September 1766. ⁴⁴ However, Bohstedt notes that the crowd in Mold placed all the corn they had seized in the Town House to await later distribution. Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy’, 67.
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his study of the riots of 1766, likewise cast doubt upon the supposed ‘honesty’ of the mob since many rioters simply seized foods without payment. The historian faces difficulties when examining this question because of the shortage of evidence and, particularly, of evidence offering ‘thick description’. The limited coverage of the 1740 riots in the press, which itself was only slowly developing in size and confidence, makes it hard to know whether money did exchange hands since reports are short. However, even later reports for 1756 or 1766 did not necessarily distinguish when a mob offered some payment in exchange for produce or simply made off with it. Nor can the historian rely upon the legal records to help here, since, whether a rioter stole the goods or paid a price less than that demanded, this legally constituted theft and was charged as such.⁴⁵ The ‘problem’ of evaluating the behaviour of the mob is not helped by conflating price setting with ‘orderliness’, an aspect of Thompson’s argument which has been somewhat distorted. Bohstedt, for example, and Williams, singly and collectively, have taken Thompson to task on this issue. Yet an ‘orderly riot’ is clearly an oxymoron. In fact, a food riot could be both orderly and disorderly, in varying degrees.⁴⁶ Take the case of the Shropshire miners. In November 1756, as prices rose steadily after the bad harvest, miners from Madeley and its surrounding villages stopped work and marched en masse to Wenlock market. There, rejecting the farmers’ price of 8s. a bushel, they insisted that corn should be sold at 5s. Where vendors refused, the grain was simply seized but it is clear that, where the farmers complied, they received their money. The next day, the miners, reinforced with men from neighbouring pits, marched into Shifnal and repeated their pricefixing activities, again without serious violence. They then set out on a series of marches around the district, visiting farms, seizing grain, or demanding beer, food, and sometimes money instead. Their actions meant that very few farmers attended the next market at Wellington on 11 November. Here local mine owners, led by the MP for Wenlock, and the large farmers organized a vigilante force of some 2500 men, confronted the miners and summarily restored order. At the same time, great efforts were made to placate the crowd, with the tenants of the largest landowners being publicly charged to bring wheat to the markets and sell it at the rioters’ price of 5s.⁴⁷ Ludlow and Kidderminster to the south also experienced riots. Here too rioters reacted to rapidly rising prices and targeted farmers in the markets. At Ludlow, colliers insisted that the farmers sell them corn at 5s. a bushel and, ‘on their refusal, carried away great quantities thereof without paying for it; after which they dispersed and peace was restored’.⁴⁸ In both areas, therefore, miners mixed price fixing, forcible seizure of foods, and extortion. It was a mixture found everywhere. ⁴⁵ Randall, ‘Gloucestershire Food Riots’, 84. ⁴⁶ On this issue, see Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest, 6–8. ⁴⁷ Manchester Mercury, 25 November 1756; SP 36/136, Whitmore to Holdernesse, n.d. ⁴⁸ Bath Journal, 29 November 1756; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvi (1756), 544. The price of wheat at Gloucester market rose to 7s. at the end of September and reached 8s. by the end of November.
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Most historians have treated ‘riots’ as singular or linked events. Bohstedt, however, aggregates all riots in ‘contiguous districts within the same week’ and treats them as ‘one event’.⁴⁹ This is a novel approach but one which threatens seriously to distort our understanding. Firstly, it is hard to be sure that those taking part in one individual disturbance remained as participants even in protests that immediately followed on from it, let alone in all those disturbances in the same ‘district’ for a period of seven days. Indeed, the evidence of ‘A Mobber’ suggests that even the hardiest rioter might find the going tough after a couple of days ‘mobbing’. Second, riots often occurred simultaneously in contiguous parishes, even the same parish, so clearly different individuals were involved. For example, in Gloucestershire in 1766 the woollen workers of Stroudwater made up the core of the rioters. Here a method quickly became established. A large crowd would assemble early in the morning and divide into smaller parties, each being assigned a specific target. William Dallaway reported that they had spent Monday, 15 September, ‘doing great violence to bakers and millers in different places. A body of them, not less than 200, went to Cirencester market, where the town being apprized of their coming prevented much mischief being-done.’⁵⁰ At Oldbury and Woodchester other groups seized cheese and wheat, while one of two bolting mills at Woodchester was smashed. The other was saved when its owner, Lord Ducie, promised to pay the rioters 2 guineas. This he did, somewhat formally, the following day.⁵¹ As night wore on, a crowd of 150 surrounded the house of John Butcher at Stonehouse, forced their way in, and destroyed a handpowered bolting machine he owned. Carrying off a bolting cloth as a flag, they marched to Paganhill where they attacked and destroyed a huckster’s house.⁵² As day dawned on the 16th, the mob reassembled and attended Minchinhampton market, ‘where, though they met with some resistance’, they again ‘set the price’. Later that evening another group ‘occasioned much disturbance at Stroud’.⁵³ The following day the same thing happened. Horns summoned the mob and a miller and a baker in the parish were attacked. The majority, however, again divided into parties. One group went to Tetbury where they were vigorously repulsed. Another larger group went to Berkeley Castle to protest to the Lord Lieutenant about the price of food and to demand action. They were said to have numbered some 500. ‘Several other bodies were dispersed about that day.’ That ⁴⁹ Bohstedt, ‘The pragmatic economy’, 84 n. 21. Williams uses a similar approach towards counting riots: ‘an episode comprising many incidents protracted over several days counts equally with a minor market-place affair or a threatening letter.’ D. E. Williams, ‘Midland Hunger Riots in 1766’, Midland History, iii (1975–6), 284. ⁵⁰ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 17 September 1766. ⁵¹ TS 11/1128, cases against Pegler, Evans, Stephens, Dangerfield. ⁵² Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 September 1766; Gloucester Journal, 22 December 1766; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvi (1766), 494; Hardwicke Mss., Add. Mss. 35,607, Pitt to Hardwicke, 17 December 1766; TS 11/1128, case against Wildey, Teakle, Lewis; against Cratchley, Cowley. ⁵³ Hardwicke Mss., Add. Mss. 35,607, Harris to Hardwicke, 3 October 1766; Annual Register, ix (1766), 138; PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 17 September 1766.
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night a crowd forced their way into John Clissold’s shop in Stroud, and, contrary to his assurances, found large quantities of cheese and bacon. They took it and marched to the house of a local cheese factor, John Neale. Here they discovered and seized over 200 lb of cheese. Neale was paid 2d. per pound for new cheese and 3d. for old cheese, about half its market value.⁵⁴ Such groups were clearly part of a coordinated strategy. Yet their behaviour varied according to circumstances and to the reception which they were accorded. Some fixed prices, others took food without payment. Some behaved deferentially, others with calculated violence. No one ‘characteristic’ can accurately sum up their actions. This can be seen even where there is clear evidence that essentially the same ‘team’ took part in all actions. Another example from Gloucestershire makes the point. On 22 September a crowd numbering over 1,000 assembled on Minchinhampton Common early in the morning, sporting the usual flags and horns. They marched towards Cirencester where, a week earlier, a smaller contingent of ‘regulators’, as they dubbed themselves, had been given a very rough handling by the farmers. Cirencester was the biggest grain market on the Cotswolds and home to many large dealers. With food supplies running very scarce in the textile-making valleys, it was a significant prize. As they made their way along the turnpike, their numbers swelled as others joined them so between 1,200 and 1,500 entered Cirencester in the early afternoon. Here they commandeered vast quantities of food and took it to the marketplace where it was pitched and sold. Others visited the neighbouring farms and villages, again seeking out food. Wheat was sold out at 5s. a bushel and cheese for 2d. or 21⁄ 2 d. per pound. Not everyone paid for what they took. A resident lamented, ‘they have this day seized all the corn, flour, cheese and bacon in the town and neighbourhood, and there is now nothing left but the plunder of houses.’ Many returned, carrying their purchases, to Stroudwater. However, a not insignificant section of the crowd marched eastwards, imposing their prices at Ampney, Fairford, and eventually at Lechlade, a further twelve miles beyond Cirencester. Though reduced in number, they not only ‘set the price’: they also demanded and were accorded lodgings in an inn ‘in the same manner as Soldiers are Billetted’. Incredibly, the following days saw this same remnant of the original crowd march all the way to Abingdon, a further 18 miles east, where they seem to have triggered a whole new set of riots in towns along the Thames. Another section from the original crowd clearly stayed in Cirencester on the night of the 22nd because the following day they searched a farm outside the village of Bagendon and, finding some grain, carried that back into the market to sell.⁵⁵ Such complex actions cannot be simply aggregated into one or other ‘typology’ of riot. ⁵⁴ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 20 September 1766; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 September 1766; TS 11/1128, testimonies of Clissold, Davies, Neale. ⁵⁵ PC 1/8/41, Bathurst to Conway, 22 September 1766; WO 4/80, D’Oyly to Bathurst, 6 October 1766; TS 11/1128, cases against Sawyer, Onion, Belcher, Haines, Beams, Clift, and Adely.
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The question of the ‘honesty’ or not of the food rioting crowd is in many respects a fruitless one. Clearly in events such as those described many did indeed take food without payment, sometimes with menaces. We should not see the rioters, even the self-styled ‘regulators’ of Gloucestershire, as a sort of civic moral enforcement unit. Their actions were driven not by a desire to cleanse the morals of the market-makers but by the fear of starvation. They were also, however, clearly motivated by considerable anger at the way in which those with control over their food supplies appeared to be profiteering from their distress. We should be surprised not that property was stolen but by the fact that many owners were recompensed, if at a below-market rate. The example of the Cirencester riot shows this. With so many ‘regulators’ and so few townsmen who might be able to recognize and therefore prosecute them, rioters did not need to be ‘honest’. Yet, as with their counterparts in many other similar disorders, they felt that, in ‘setting the price’, they were acting within the spirit if not the letter of the law. Price fixing was only one feature of eighteenth-century food riots. Another, perhaps more prevalent, characteristic was resistance to the transportation of locally produced foodstuffs to distant markets. The moral economy model of marketing, underpinned by the old statutes, emphasized that food should be marketed locally. In times of mounting shortage, the ‘transportation’ of foodstuffs to distant markets, and in particular ‘abroad’, was always likely to rouse popular ire. As ‘A Mobber’ noted, news of such exportation ‘exasperated us the more’. All consumers hated to see ‘their’ food being carted away for ‘foreigners’ to eat in times of shortage. Some groups, however, were particularly sensitive to such exportations, being heavily dependent upon the local suppliers. This was certainly the case in Cornwall in the tin-mining districts. Cornish tinners proved to be some of the most persistent food rioters of early Hanoverian England. In the main, the first two to three decades of Georgian rule was spared significant disorders over the cost and availability of food. This reflected generally favourable harvests up to 1739 and a relatively slow rate of population increase, and hence demand for food. Combined, these two factors meant that nationally shortages were infrequent and prices low. However, local and regional circumstances were more important in the far south-west. The rapid development of the tin-mining industry after the Restoration created an increasingly large population of tinners in the western districts who were totally dependent upon the food market for their subsistence. With a shortage of good soils and a high proportion of wastes, arable production in Cornwall always was at a premium and it was little wonder that here ‘the generality of farmers [have] an idea that there is nothing like corn in sacks, for making money’.⁵⁶ In years of plenty, local markets could be supplied and surplus production shipped from the county to markets further east.⁵⁷ ⁵⁶ G. B. Worgon, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Cornwall (1815), 53. ⁵⁷ J. Rule, The Labouring Miner in Cornwall c. 1740–1820 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 1971), 121–5.
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However, in times of rising prices, the tin miners viewed such shipments as direct threats to their living standards, indeed to their very survival. Their reaction was fierce. In the spring of 1728, grain prices in the county rose rapidly, amid rumours that dealers were buying up grain to transport by sea to distant markets. Finding their main local market at Redruth denuded of supplies, a large body of miners marched to Falmouth and ransacked dealers’ warehouses. Large quantities of grain were seized and taken away.⁵⁸ Troops were dispatched to the county to supplement an already considerable garrison and peace was temporarily restored.⁵⁹ However, the following spring again saw the miners roaming the ports, seeking out corn supplies. More troops and a Royal Proclamation were necessary before the disorders subsided.⁶⁰ Local authorities denied miners’ claims that corn was being hoarded. Such claims were, the mayor of Falmouth asserted, ‘in all probability false’, though he undermined his case by arguing that the quickest way to bring disturbances to a halt would be by suspending all exportation of corn.⁶¹ Disturbances again broke out in the county in 1737. Contemporaries noted that food prices were not at the high levels of 1728–9, but it is clear that there were shortages in the local markets. Again the miners asserted their belief that these were the direct result of dealers who were hoarding corn supplies, either in the expectation of higher profits to be made later or to transport to markets up country. A Falmouth merchant received a warning from a man who had visited Redruth market earlier in the week: I am told you have bought up a large quantity of corn lately, which has been the means of raising the price of corn to such a degree, as to incense the tinners so much against you and your family that I am creditably informed no less than a thousand of them will be with you tomorrow.⁶²
The citizens of Falmouth mustered and, as the miners approached, fired upon them, causing their retreat. Peace was preserved here, but in the smaller port of Penryn the miners were more successful. On 19 September a crowd of some 400 marched into the town and attacked the warehouse of a corn dealer. They managed to seize many sacks of grain before being driven off by a military force.⁶³
⁵⁸ SP Domestic, 36/4, Mayor of Falmouth to Duke of Newcastle, n.d. It was said that the miners’ actions were emboldened by the fact that many of the soldiers stationed in the town were sick. ⁵⁹ However, in May the tinners again threatened to visit Falmouth. Forewarned, the local authorities gathered an impressive military presence, which, supplemented by the presence of a large man-of-war in the harbour, dissuaded the miners from a repeat performance. Ibid., 15 May 1728. ⁶⁰ BL Mss. 32,687, Newcastle papers, petition of the magistrates and gentlemen of Cornwall to Newcastle, ff. 562. ⁶¹ SP Domestic, 36/4, Mayor of Falmouth to Duke of Newcastle, n.d. ⁶² SP Domestic, 36/12, Hicks to Pye, September 1737, enclosed in Mayor of Falmouth to Newcastle, 18 September 1737. ⁶³ The citizens of Falmouth appear to have been less pleased when they found out that the cost of the additional troops would fall upon them. The mayor reminded them that, without this force, all corn stocks in the town, some 250 quarters, he said, would be at risk. BL Add. Mss. 36,690, Newcastle papers, f. 479. The riots prompted the state to pass a new Act that increased punishments
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The free miners of the Forest of Dean and the coalminers of Kingswood, north of Bristol, were likewise heavily dependent upon external supplies for their bread. Like their fellows in Cornwall, they did not sit idly by. This can be seen in their part in the extensive disorders of 1740, riots which Bohstedt describes as ‘the first national wave’ of food rioting.⁶⁴ Again the background was one of growing scarcity. The harvest of 1739, which at first appeared likely to be abundant, was spoiled by bad weather and from the early autumn fears of an impending dearth began to circulate. The winter proved exceptionally severe—indeed it was among the coldest on record—and prices rose rapidly. Trade was disrupted and industries contracted. Corn mills froze up and could not grind and frozen waterways prevented the transport of coals. This ‘calamitous and rigorous season of cold weather’, as the Gloucester Journal described it, led to widespread distress, and charitable donations to help the poor were commenced in many towns. Robert Raikes, proprietor of the Journal, hoped that these ‘Truly Christian examples . . . will be followed by all to whom providence has blest with plenty’.⁶⁵ Paternalist measures clearly helped. However, as prices steadily rose into the spring and early summer, the pressure on food stocks was compounded by two factors: dealers stockpiled grain in anticipation of even higher prices; meanwhile the demands of the wealthier London market threatened to draw down still further supplies from already depleted regional markets. Rioting broke out in the spring and did not come to an end until the new harvest was in. In the Forest of Dean, local supplies of grain could never sustain the population. As shortages impinged in July 1740, miners began to tour the district, seeking out supplies. Their main targets were millers and dealers. The former were suspected of stockpiling grain while the latter were accused of wanting to transport ‘local’ foodstuffs to wealthier markets in Bristol and beyond. The disorders were extensive, with a Redbrook miller having his house and mills badly damaged. The fact that those subsequently arrested and charged with this attack were sentenced only to a fine of £5 and made to find sureities for a year suggests that the bench had some sympathy.⁶⁶ The Kingswood miners were likewise dependent upon outside supplies, in particular on the Bristol market. In September, when prices generally were falling, they were said to be ‘scouring the countryside from Bath to Bristol looking for millers and innkeepers suspected of hoarding corn’. Their attempt to enter Bristol in force was resisted by troops but a delegation, assuring the mayor ‘that they came with no intent to harm any man, but for the good of their country’, demanded ‘redress for their grievances, by having corn allowed them at six shillings a bushel’. The miners did not disperse for a week.⁶⁷ The combined actions of these two groups in turn threatened the supplies to the city of Bristol itself. There major charitable actions sought to prevent disturbances. for food rioting and enabled those who lost goods to be compensated by the Hundred up to £100. It did nothing to deter food riots. 11 Geo. III, c.22. ⁶⁴ Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy’, 60. ⁶⁵ Gloucester Journal, 5, 12 February 1740. ⁶⁶ Ibid., 22 July 1740. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 30 September, 7 October 1740.
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The transportation of grain from the Tyne and Tees occasioned food riots there in May 1740. At Newcastle women led protests against high prices and then attempted to unload a ship at the quayside. When an alderman, supported by a private army, confronted them and fired upon the crowd, major disturbances followed.⁶⁸ Rioters disrupted Stockton market and continued for some days, with mobs from that town, Billingham, and Norton, roaming the countryside, seeking grain stockpiled for export. The magistrates later admitted that the warehouses of the Stockton corn merchants were full. On 6 June a ship in Stockton harbour, bound for Amsterdam, was boarded by a crowd composed mainly of women. The owner, a corn merchant, was told that he was ‘little better than a rebel’ and ordered to sell the corn at 3s. a bushel. When he refused, he was thrown in the river and the corn seized. Troops were deployed but the officer was not prepared to act vigorously against the crowd, arguing that his authority did not extend to coercive action. The crowd, now reinforced by groups of miners from neighbouring pit villages, therefore continued to roam the countryside seeking out supplies of food. The High Sheriff, in desperation, called out the posse comitatus, a forced levee of all able-bodied male citizens. They provided protection while Stockton merchants loaded some 1,200 bushels of grain onto ships. As in Newcastle, magistrates chose to protect those involved with exporting foodstuffs rather than seeking to coerce them to make it available locally.⁶⁹ When extensive food riots broke out in the spring of 1753, it was again the exportation of grain that was popularly blamed for shortages. A crowd of 700 Mendip miners invaded the market at Shepton Mallet and, ‘on pretence of the great quantity of corn exported abroad’, worked their way systematically around the inns ‘where corn was lodged and oblig’d the owners to sell at the prices they thought proper’.⁷⁰ In November 1756, as riots spread to the south-west, a large crowd assembled at Taunton to prevent a consignment of wheat leaving the town on a small sailing ship. When this attempt failed, the crowd attacked dealers and mills around the town, seizing flour and grain.⁷¹ The Taunton attack on corn mills indicates a third common target. Millers had long been mistrusted since they occupied a pivotal role in the food chain. Improvements in mill machinery meant that larger, more powerful, mills tended to predominate while the decline in home-baking further isolated the miller from consumers. An increasing demand for white wheaten bread skewed the trade towards those with the newer bolting mills, which sifted the grains more finely. It also allowed increased opportunities to mix illegal substances into the flour, a fact that the rioters at Salisbury and Bradley mills discovered to their immense anger. They were not alone. A bolting mill at Wermbridge was the target of the first food ⁶⁸ J. Ellis, ‘Urban Conflict and Popular Violence: The Guildhall Riots of 1740 in Newcastle upon Tyne’, International Review of Social History, xxv (1980), 340–4. ⁶⁹ Newcastle Journal, 21 June 1740; Ellis, ‘Urban Conflict’, 344. ⁷⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxiii (1753), 246. ⁷¹ Bath Journal, 29 November 1756; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvi (1756), 544.
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riot in Staffordshire in 1756.⁷² And in January 1757 food rioters in Taunton, roaming the corn mills around the town in search of wheat, discovered ‘two sacks of Whiting-Balls, which they imagined were designed to be mixed with the flour’. They were ‘so enraged that they levelled the mill with the ground’.⁷³ As millers grew more wealthy, many became increasingly involved in the emerging national market in grain and flour. When in April 1740 riots erupted in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a county with no recent history of such disturbances, a crowd of some 400 men and women, led by drums, attacked two mills near Dewsbury, battering their way in and then making off with as much corn as they could carry. They claimed that this, and mills like it, were grinding corn to send to the Lancashire market, a fact apparently later confirmed when they came across a dealer’s wagon en route for that county, though this proved to be a decoy, containing only bran dust. When confronted by the MP for York, Sir John Kaye, and the High Sheriff, the crowd told them that their intention was ‘to prevent Corn being carried out of the Country’ and that they would continue until this was stopped. Three further mills were attacked and considerable quantities of grain and flour were seized. When a corn merchant’s warehouse was attacked, however, they were driven off with gunfire and several captured. The following day, the crowd tried unsuccessfully to free them. Troops, rapidly introduced into the district, restored order and rounded up ‘ringleaders’. They were harshly treated at the assizes, ten men being transported and a further four gaoled.⁷⁴ The riots in Staffordshire in August 1756 were blamed on ‘the advance of the price of wheat made by the millers and engrossers of that commodity’.⁷⁵ However, it is also worth noting that by no means all corn mills were targets of food rioters. The report from Wiltshire in September 1766 emphasized this: ‘They touch no mills but such as deal to their oppression.’ This represented not just simple pragmatism—had rioters destroyed all the mills, they would have deprived themselves of bread since their supply of flour would have been closed. Attacks on mill machinery reflected popular punishment of those who were seen as having abused the trust of the public. In this, as in other aspects of food riots, there was a strong sense of consumer retribution. Millers understood this and in many cases tried desperately to convince consumers that they had no part in exacerbating shortages. For example, in November 1756 John Packer, a Painswick miller, inserted a notice in the Gloucester Journal denying that he was exporting wheat and flour. Wheat that he was exporting had been seized in the summer and he could ill-afford another loss. Joseph Richards, a Marston Bigot miller, had earlier published his oath denying ‘the several reports lately spread by some ⁷² Northampton Mercury, 23 August 1756, cited in J. Caple, Popular Protest and Public Order in Eighteenth-Century England: The Food Riots of 1756–7 (unpublished M.A. thesis, Queens University, Kingston, Canada, 1978) 40. This remains the only comprehensive study of the food riots of 1756. ⁷³ Bath Journal, 24 January 1757. ⁷⁴ Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy’, 60–2; BL Add. Mss. 32,695, Newcastle papers, f. 590. ⁷⁵ Bath Journal, 30 August 1756.
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evil-minded person or persons, that this Deponent, Joseph Richards, has sent Bread Flour to Bristol, and other ports, in order to be exported to France’. He even got the local justices to support him.⁷⁶ All historians agree that, while in crisis years, minor food riots might be expected everywhere, the more extended and extensive disorders had their origin in communities of industrial workers and miners. Such groups, living in large and surprisingly cohesive communities, shared a common exposure both to the vagaries of the food market and to the vicissitudes of the trade or industry. This forged a strong sense of unity and a common purpose to resist those who attacked or threatened their ‘rights’. Textile workers in Devon, in the West of England, and in East Anglia had histories of food rioting stretching back into the seventeenth century.⁷⁷ So too did the miners of Cornwall, Somerset, and Gloucestershire and of the Peak District. In all these regions food riots in the eighteenth century followed patterns established before. In 1740 disturbances in Essex, as earlier, centred around the kersey-making districts. Trade was poor and the threats to food supplies triggered riots in which crowds of textile workers sought out stores of grain and attacked mills. These lasted several weeks, despite the efforts of the Colchester magistrates, aided by dragoons who had been rushed to the area to suppress them.⁷⁸ The extensive food riots in Somerset in 1757 started in Frome but rapidly spread to the districts around. The earliest protagonists were woollen workers but soon they were reinforced by Mendip colliers. In April and May worse was to follow. Mills around Castle Cary were attacked and markets and farms around Shepton Mallet and Bruton visited by angry crowds who demanded that food be brought to local markets. At Frome riotous colliers demolished one mill and fought a pitched battle at another where three were killed and two more seriously wounded by the miller and his sons.⁷⁹ Riots broke out in the neighbouring county of Wiltshire, where the textile districts were now much disturbed.⁸⁰ Only when it became clear that the new harvest would be productive did the rioting stop since farmers and dealers looked to sell their stocks. The rapidly expanding textile districts around Manchester were also heavily hit. Riots broke out first in June in Manchester but within weeks they had spread to the whole region. In November there were serious clashes with the volunteers and regular army.⁸¹ Again the main protagonists proved to be weavers and colliers and their ⁷⁶ Gloucester Journal, 30 November 1756; Bath Journal, 12 June 1756. ⁷⁷ See, for example, J. Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, Hutchinson, 1980), ch. 2. ⁷⁸ SP 36/50, Mayor of Colchester to Secretary of State, 28 May 1740; 36/51, Magistrates of Colchester, 23 June 1740. ⁷⁹ Bath Journal, 11 April 1757; WO 4/53, War Office to Lt. Col. La Fausille, n.d. ⁸⁰ Bath Journal, 30 May, 6, 27 June 1757. ⁸¹ Whitworth’s Manchester Advertiser, 21 November 1757; Manchester Mercury, 15 November 1757. At Liverpool the corporation armed the merchants and their servants as a precaution of attacks by the crowd. P. Touzeau, The Rise and Progress of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1910) 516–17.
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main targets corn mills and dealers. The riots were interlinked with industrial disputes. Thus it was claimed that, as the price of bread rose, the wages of the poor decreased because the employers ‘refused to pay the Workmen their accustomed Wages for their Work’.⁸² Such prolonged and focused crowd actions required a strong sense of cohesion and collective support, forged in earlier confrontations with employers, market dealers, or authorities. It is clear that having once ‘successfully’ rioted, a community was more likely to do so again. And even if ‘major’ confrontations were by no means ‘regular’, the folk memory and sense of confidence that came from previous actions proved a strong mobilizing agency and an equally strong source of concern to opponents.⁸³ That is not to say that everyone in these industrial or mining districts took part voluntarily. Dallaway, a clothier, noted that ‘The rioters come into our workshops and force all the men, willing or unwilling to join them.’⁸⁴ The rioters believed the problem of food supply was a common one and were determined that all should take part in actions which were for the common good. If such regions remained the epicentres of food rioting, in time of extensive disorder riots might occur in previously peaceful towns and villages and even in the large cities which, like London, usually sought to avoid such conflicts. For example, in Sheffield on 25 August 1756 a crowd of 500 labouring poor took over the market when they found that the farmers had more than doubled prices for meal and corn. For two days they controlled streets, defying the authorities. Only when the magistracy agreed to ensure that the market was supplied at the previous prices was order restored.⁸⁵ In Nottingham major disorders broke out when a crowd, said to number 2,000, which ‘had already committed great outrages against the ingrossers of corn’, invaded the market. They pulled down ‘a very good house . . . on account of its being built with French stone, and occupied by one of the ingrossers’. A heavy military presence was drafted in and used in a vigorous counter-insurgency manner with raids into the neighbouring country to capture suspects. Riots here petered out.⁸⁶ If men made up the majority of the marauding bands of regulators, women were often prominent in the early stages of food riots. Riots in Exeter in 1757 began when men allegedly sent their wives to put pressure on the farmers in the market to lower their prices. They met with some success until a group of bakers ⁸² J. Collier, The Truth in a Mask, or Shudhill Fight (Manchester, 1757) 14. ⁸³ The frequency of such collective actions can be exaggerated but Rule’s summary of the experiences of the Cornish tinners provides a good corrective to the idea that there was little generational transmission: ‘A miner born in 1750 would have childhood memories of the food riots of 1757, and could have participated in the riots in 1773, 1795 1796 and 1801. . . . Apart from food rioting, he would have been a youth at the time of the pottery smashing [in 1766] and have participated in the riots of the 1780s.’ Rule, The Labouring Miner in Cornwall, 193. ⁸⁴ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 20 September 1766. A rioter who encountered Francis Newman, a labourer, near Woodchester in 1766 told him, ‘Damn my soul if thou shal’t not go along with me Frank or else I’ll knock thy brains.’ TS 11/1128, testimony of Francis Newman. ⁸⁵ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 5 September 1756. ⁸⁶ Bath Journal, 6 October 1756; SP 36/135, ff. 256–7, 299, 300, reports from Samuel Fellows.
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came along and offered 2s. 6d. a sack more. The women ‘swore they would carry the first man that attempted it before the mayor, upon which the farmers swore they would bring no more to market and the sanguine females threatened the farmers that if they did not, they would come and take it by force out of their sacks.’⁸⁷ ‘A female mob assembled in the market place at Hereford, upon information that some of the badgers had offered to buy grain above the market price; after seizing the badger, and beating him in a severe manner, [they] broke all the windows of his house.’⁸⁸ As noted, women were also prominent in disturbances in Newcastle and Stockton in 1740 and at Oxford, Leicester, and Kidderminster in 1766. Since women tended to be in charge of the weekly budget for food, they found themselves at the forefront when prices rose. An impressionistic overview of riots in the century suggests that women rioters were less inclined than their male counterparts to recompense those whose goods they sequestered.⁸⁹ Dallaway reported that, after the early riots there, Gloucestershire ‘regulators’ would not allow women or boys to go with them in an attempt to prevent pilfering. However, contrary to the view that the authorities were ‘softer’ on women protesters, women were frequently included among those later charged for theft. Occasionally they played prominent parts. For example, of the eight tried for riot and theft at the farm of John Collett at Alderley in 1766, no fewer than six were women.⁹⁰ In any number of cases, the historian finds evidence that the rioters believed that they had ‘justice’ on their side. In some cases, the crowd sought to involve the magistrates from the outset to punish those who were transgressing market statutes. In 1757 the Bedworth colliers brought a formal complaint to the Coventry justices against a farmer who ‘promised to sell the colliers several bags of wheat; but instead of so doing, set out with it this very morning . . . and brought a whole load to a Coventry baker who gave a higher price for it’.⁹¹ At Gloucester, a crowd in 1757 who had seized a large quantity of wheat immediately lodged an information ‘against the owner for selling it by sample, contrary to the last Act of Parliament’.⁹² Cornish miners wrote, with a nice mix of deference and threat, to the High Sheriff, asking him to seek the King’s support to restrain maltsters. ‘This we implore you first with tears, but if you lie sleeping and we starving by your side, we will soon gather and burn your house and destroy you and yorn.’⁹³ The weavers who ransacked the mill belonging to Timothy Ratten, a Stroud miller, told him that they had ‘all the gentlemen’ on their side. They also pointed out that ⁸⁷ Manchester Mercury, 26 April 1757. ⁸⁸ Bristol Journal, 7 May 1757. ⁸⁹ J. Bohstedt, ‘Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots, 1790–1810’, Past and Present, cxx (1988), 88–122. His attempt to quantify female participation in riots was given short shrift by Thompson, Customs in Common, 307–36. ⁹⁰ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 20 September 1766; G.J., 22 December 1766, 10 January 1767; TS 11/1128, cases against Betty Brockenborough, Ann Froam, Sarah Smith, Sarah Turner, Sarah Walker, Betty Warlock. Only one man, Daniel Cambridge, was charged, though he clearly was the leader of the mob, having arrived on horseback at the head of a crowd claimed to number over 800. ⁹¹ In Coventry the inhabitants ‘patted the colliers on the back and urged them to go through with what they had begun’. SP 36/135, ff. 285–8. ⁹² Worcester Journal, 5 May 1757. ⁹³ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 14 February 1757.
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the Earl of Berkeley had given them 3 guineas, which indeed he had.⁹⁴ In fact, he had greeted the 500 or so weavers who had marched to his home and given them a lengthy hearing. They left with the clear impression that they had his support in regulating markets. ‘Many that are under sentence of death thought they were doing a meritorious act at the very moment they were forfeiting their lives’, wrote John Pitt, no friend to the rioters, as the trials reached their conclusion. Stephen Cratchley, hanged for having been the horn blower in the attack in Paganhill of the shop of Thomas Chandler, ‘a villager that sold huckstry’, stated just before his head went into the noose that ‘he little thought his crime had been of so heinous a nature’.⁹⁵ If assaults on property were commonplace, assaults on individuals were far more rare. Where such violence did break out, it was usually started when millers, as at Beckington, farmers, or dealers resisted the seizure of their goods. At Paganhill a crowd of over 100 demanded that Thomas Chandler allow them in to check whether he was withholding foodstuffs. Chandler refused. The aggravation to the mob was that when they came to the house the man defended it and threw a chamber pot out of the windows, and on the mob’s not dispersing, without giving any previous warning, opened the dore and shot one of the mob dead.
The crowd, enraged by this action, burst into the house, and first destroyed the contents and then ‘pulled down’ the building. Chandler escaped by the back door. When rioters at Minchinhampton were shot at, they forced their way into the house, ‘destroying all the furniture, windows, etc., and partially untiled it. They have given out since that they greatly repented of this act because it was not the master of the house (he being from home) that fired upon them.’ Again, as at Beckington, their assailants were allowed to flee. Most unprovoked violence against the person was directed against informers.⁹⁶ In assuming that they had the law on their side, rioters were mindful that, in many cases, the magistrates had sought to pre-empt disorder by a public warning against market malfeasance. For example, in April 1756 the mayor of Worcester ordered the public proclamation of the old laws against illegal market practices since there was a growing volume of complaint, even though no disorders had occurred. In Manchester and Liverpool, magistrates ordered abstracts of the old laws to be posted in the markets while at Chester justices launched a clampdown on engrossers and forestallers and in November charged some twenty to thirty ⁹⁴ TS 11/5956/1128. ⁹⁵ Hardwicke Mss. Add. Mss. 35,607. Pitt to Hardwicke, 20 December 1766; Bath Chronicle, 15 January 1767. ⁹⁶ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 7, 20 September 1766; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvi (1766), 494; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 September 1766; Hardwicke Mss., Add. Mss. 35,607, Pitt to Hardwicke, 17 December 1766. John Smith, who informed against rioters at Cowley, was beaten up, while a Wiltshire farmer had a rick burned after a warning ‘dam us if dont be Revenge on you and all you Effects’. Hardwicke Mss., Add. Mss. 35,607, Pitt to Hardwicke, 17 December 1766; Gloucester Journal, 20 October 1766.
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offenders.⁹⁷ Moreover, in both 1756 and 1766, the government itself reinforced the opinion of both rioters and general public that the shortages were the result of middlemen and chicanery. In 1756, when riots broke out in the Midlands, the Secretary of State ordered the Lord Lieutenants there to investigate whether high prices were to blame.⁹⁸ When the riots spread, the government ‘issued a proclamation by which the purchasing of corn for transportation without a license is entirely prohibited; the old laws relating to forestalling and regrating are ordered to be put into execution.’ Within a month a new proclamation ordered ‘an embargo be forthwith laid on all ships laden . . . with corn, malt, meal, flour, bread . . . to be exported to foreign parts.’⁹⁹ In 1766, the government not only reissued proclamations against forestalling, regrating, and engrossing, but urged the quarter sessions to give them the fullest publicity. They served only to show a wider public that the state itself held middlemen to blame for shortages. In so acting, the government and the justices were reflecting wider public opinion, as evidenced in the press. While few newspapers were prepared to support disorder, many were none too subtle in their condemnation of regraters and forestallers in the market or in their analysis that it was middlemen who were responsible for the shortages. Let us take one newspaper, the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, as an example. In November 1756, as tensions rose and riots broke out across the country, it published a letter accusing millers and farmers of forming a combination to push prices to exorbitant levels. It also hinted that a local corn dealer had made profits of over 140 per cent by buying up grain before the harvest. In May 1757, when anger against regraters was running high, the paper reported that a Hereford farmer had 20,000 quarters of grain, which he would not sell because he anticipated that prices would rise still higher. In June a letter argued that ‘there is the greatest probability of a fine crop’, but blamed the continuing high prices on the ‘arts’ of engrossers. And in December the paper was denouncing ‘combinations’ to cheat the consumer.¹⁰⁰ Yet Salisbury was a major wheat market and its readers included many involved in the grain trade. The fact that the Journal was prepared to publish such statements indicates how widespread antipathy towards middlemen was. While its middling-sort readers were not prepared to support rioting, they shared the crowd’s mistrust of the dealers and millers, a view shared by the respectable inhabitants of Bristol and Norwich.¹⁰¹ A key feature of Thompson’s thesis was his view that food riots might be managed by a judicious admixture of persuasion and concession, in particular through an overt and public regulation of the market. Thus in September 1766, ⁹⁷ Worcester Journal, 21 April 1756; Manchester Mercury, 26 July, 23 November 1756; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 28 November 1756. ⁹⁸ Caple, Popular Protest and Public Order, 71. ⁹⁹ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvi (1756), 546; Bath Chronicle, 7 December 1756. ¹⁰⁰ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 22 November 1756, 30 May, 20 June, 12 December 1757. ¹⁰¹ S. Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition: Market Management in Bristol, 1709–1815’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest, 91–114 and Renton, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Middling Sort’, in ibid. 115–36.
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following a riot in the butter market, the justices at Worcester toured the different markets in the town reading the King’s Proclamation against forestalling. They not only informed consumers that they intended to enforce the laws strictly, but also pressed vendors to sell at ‘reasonable’ prices. Additional constables were enrolled to help enforce market regulations.¹⁰² At Coventry, where scrupulous attention was paid to market regulation, peace was broken when miners from Bedworth marched upon the city on 26 September, fresh from confrontations in the surrounding area. The magistrates had ordered that no food should be stored in inns or warehouses. The miners demanded that the mayor provided search warrants to examine dealers’ houses where they suspected food was being hoarded. ‘The mayor promised to provide them redress, provided any certain information could be given that anything contrary to law had been done by the factors.’ Clearly the miners had accurate information since the first two warehouses examined proved to contain significant holdings of cheese. This was taken to the market and formally sold at 21⁄ 2 d. per pound. As the investigations proceeded, more cheese was discovered and more people became involved. The process threatened to degenerate into disorder but the mayor kept his head and warned the crowd that, if that happened, he would have to read the Riot Act. With his assurances that the market would be properly regulated, the miners left peaceably.¹⁰³ At Kidderminster the magistrates pressed all the right paternal buttons when they met in the midst of rioting in late September. At the town hall, before a very large crowd, they announced a subscription for the relief of the poor and then read out the proclamation against forestalling. The bailiff addressed the populace, and assured them they should have corn at five shillings per bushel, and butter at six pence a pound; upon which they dispersed with loud acclamations of joy and satisfaction. The post very soon after arriving with the agreeable news of an embargo being laid on all vessels laden with corn for exportation, diffus’d an additional general joy, and our bells were immediately set to ringing.
The quid pro quo for this satisfactory theatrical performance was forthcoming: ‘The poor in particular promised not to disturb the markets any more.’¹⁰⁴ William Dallaway, High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, managed his encounters with rioters with a judicious mixture of firmness, concession, and exhortation. Assembling his ‘javelin men’, largely ceremonial attendants who normally were only used to escort the new Sheriff to his inauguration, and ‘a few of my own servants armed to protect the market people’, Dallaway went to Stroud market to confront the ‘regulators’. I had before desired to speak with the chief of them, but they did not meet me in a body, nor distinguish themselves to be rioters, nevertheless I understood there were many present who intermixed with the market people behaving themselves very orderly. ¹⁰² Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 25 September 1766. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 2 October 1766.
¹⁰³ Ibid., 9 October 1766.
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He read out the King’s Proclamation against forestalling and regrating, and pointed out the ‘absurdity of their conduct’ in defeating the gratuitous aid of their Sovereign by preventing markets, at which the Proclamation could be read, from taking place. Warning that continuing disorder would have fatal consequences, he assured them that, if they returned to work, they might well be forgiven for their excesses. ‘They heard me with much attention, blessed me as I passed along, and gave a cheerful shout of applause!’ He encountered another mob on his way home. Dallaway reprised his Stroud speech, to general approval and the mob shouted ‘God Save the King’. Nevertheless, they went on with their searches for food. Dallaway took comfort from their respectful behaviour. This same mob went afterwards to a farm house and civilly desired that they would thresh out and bring to market their wheat, and sell it for 5s. a bushel, which being promised, and some provisions being given them unasked for, they departed without the least violence or offence.¹⁰⁵
Gentlemen, and farmers, made other efforts to pre-empt disorder or to persuade rioters to desist. At Devizes, a major wheat market, the authorities distributed £200 of cheap grain to the poor to forestall riot, while magistrates at Truro intervened to prevent a riot by the tinners who objected to a sudden rise in wheat prices. Vendors were ‘persuaded’ to lower them.¹⁰⁶ At Witney, when trouble threatened in the marketplace, the farmers, anxious not to provoke disorders by the weavers, immediately lowered their prices.¹⁰⁷ Riots were often followed by a wave of very well-publicized benevolence towards the ‘poor’. After the Salisbury riot in 1766, ‘prominent’ farmers sent wheat ‘and caused it to be published around the city by the cryer that the poor in general might be served at 5s 6d and some at 5s’. Colonel Bathurst of Clarendon Park ordered his bailiff to supply the local poor with wheat at 5s., while at Urchfont the Earl of Chatham did the same, though at 4s. 6d. At Warminster and Frome subscriptions were started by the gentlemen to buy food to supply the poor. At Chippenham a subscription was commenced to prosecute those who sold grain by sample, while a ‘gentleman of fortune’ not only sent to market ‘a quantity of wheat and ordered it should sell at 5s a bushel’ but also threatened to evict any tenant ‘jobbing in cattle, cheese, corn, etc’.¹⁰⁸ These examples from Wiltshire and Somerset were replicated everywhere. They were an essential part of the paternalist theatre of social management. However, they made the poor wonder why such actions had not preceded disorder. That is not to say that the paternalist case was hypocritical. Many shared the view of the Gloucester Journal when it noted that, ‘when the day labourer, the ¹⁰⁵ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 20 September 1766. ¹⁰⁶ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 22 September 1766; Gloucester Journal, 29 September 1766; Jopson’s Coventry Mercury, 29 September 1766. ¹⁰⁷ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 6 October 1766. ¹⁰⁸ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 22 September, 13, 27 October 1766: Bath Chronicle, 30 October 1766.
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artificer, or journeyman cannot obtain a sufficient subsistence for themselves and families by a reasonable degree of industry . . . then they have cause to complain and ought to be assisted.’ However, providing that assistance usually had to await the stimulus which a riot generated. Many, like the Journal, urged the poor to eschew riot and trust in the generosity of the rich. ‘Subscriptions have been given in many places, and, if you are not misled by mobbers, will be made in many more.’ In Melksham, ‘in consideration of the poor not having joined in the late riots which occurred all round the town’, the gentlemen subscribed to purchase a quantity of beef, which was distributed to over 1,600 persons. But the responsible poor of Melksham had to wait until November to receive their reward. The riotous poor around hardly ‘suffered’ in comparison.¹⁰⁹ Some gentlemen took their paternal convictions further. In September 1766 groups of ‘regulators’ roamed the area to the north and east of Stroud searching out food stocks and setting the prices. Richard Bedmead, a gentleman, seems to have leant his assistance, and was certainly involved in actions around Bisley and Cowley, where farms were visited. When asked what he was doing at the head of a mob, Bedmead allegedly replied he was acting ‘for the good of the country’. He was not prosecuted.¹¹⁰ However, while the ‘paternalist’ pattern of riot management was common, there were plenty of examples when the authorities took a much more coercive line. Bohstedt argues that what he calls ‘classic food riot’ management was in fact only a feature of riots after 1750, noting that those in 1740 were dealt with in a very harsh manner. Certainly there is very little evidence of magistrates in Yorkshire or Durham seeking to find means of appeasing the mobs. Bohstedt attributes this to their lack of experience in dealing with earlier food riots.¹¹¹ The same, however, could not be said for Essex or Gloucestershire in 1740 where the authorities had long experience of dealing with disturbances among their industrial populations. Towns such as Nottingham, Norwich, and Newcastle had also seen riots before. The problem for the authorities in 1740 was not that they lacked a ‘learned repertoire’ from which to work but that they had little to offer by way of concession, given that the problem was less about price than the much hated but entirely legitimate movement of grains.¹¹² Moreover, we need to pay attention to the relationship between the magistrates and the rioters. In the Devon serge-making towns, magistrates who managed what Bohstedt characterizes as ‘classic food riots’ later in the century were often the direct or indirect employers of the rioters. They had to live close by them when disorder subsided. The magistrates of Falmouth, on the other hand, saw the ¹⁰⁹ Gloucester Journal, 29 September, 24 November 1766; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 29 September, 6 October 1766. ¹¹⁰ Hardwicke Mss., Add. Mss. 35,607, Pitt to Hardwicke, 29 September 1766; TS 11/1128, testimonies of Gregory, Whittard, Ferrat; Gloucester Journal, 13 October 1766. ¹¹¹ Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy’, 73. ¹¹² Bohstedt notes that some 60% of the riots he located were about resisting the transportation of grain.
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Cornish tinners rarely and viewed them as no better than pirates. They could afford to be rough. In 1753 the Bristol authorities chose to take a firm line with the Kingswood colliers who were threatening to visit the city’s markets. When the miners arrived, peacefully, they were confronted by armed merchants and tradesmen who launched ferocious attacks on them. Four miners were killed and twenty-nine, some gravely wounded, were taken prisoner. However, many of those who had led the resistance were also badly beaten, and the city in consequence found itself with an angry hinterland where miners made it unsafe for anyone suspected of having taken part in the armed attack on them to travel. The colliers even attempted to use the coroner’s court to bring an action against the merchants who had killed miners. Twice verdicts of wilful murder were brought in against the vigilantes, only to be overturned by an outraged Attorney General. Faced with this unwavering hostility, the city authorities not only sent food and medication to Kingswood but were forced to revise their policy. Thereafter prevention and conciliation characterized their approach.¹¹³ All local authorities in any case faced major problems in securing adequate forces to tackle disorder from a position of strength. With rioting spread so extensively, there were never sufficient troops available and those who were dispatched were often slow to arrive. Even when in place, the mobility of the ‘regulators’ posed a serious headache for commanders who were in any case often reluctant to confront rioters. When the justices resorted to older mechanisms, such as raising the posse comitatus, these proved at best modestly effective. In Durham the posse was raised and initially used successfully to tackle the rioters at Stockton. However, their job done, they dispersed home and so proved unable to prevent the prisoners they had taken from escaping.¹¹⁴ The posse was not a reliable instrument of coercion. Militia were used only sparingly in 1740 and in 1756, while in 1766 there was a marked reluctance to call them out at all, reflecting, if only in part, the fright over the response to the Militia Act.¹¹⁵ ‘A Mobber’ echoed these fears when he emphasized the key role of militiamen at ‘the Battle of Beckington mill’.¹¹⁶ There were, in food riots as in other forms of disorder, no easy solutions to the problem. CONCLUSION Eighteenth-century food riots were complex and multifaceted events that cannot easily be reduced to simple models. What they shared was a common hostility evinced by the crowd towards those who used their economic power over the ¹¹³ Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 9 June, 8 September 1753; R. W. Malcolmson, ‘ “A Set of Ungovernable People”: The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century’, in Brewer and Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People, 120–1; Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition’, 98, notes that ‘Brickdale was a Bristol turnpike commissioner who had led similar forays against the colliers’ in the riots over turnpikes four years before. ¹¹⁴ Bohstedt, ‘The Pragmatic Economy’, 71–2. ¹¹⁵ See Chapter 7. ¹¹⁶ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 29 September 1766.
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market in times of shortage to maximize their own profits at the expense of the local consumer. This was underpinned by a value system, what Thompson termed a moral economy, which was shared not only by the labouring poor but by many of the middling sort and by most of the justices. If food riots across the country shared common perceptions, the ‘theatre of riot’ too was surprisingly common. The summoning of crowds by horns, the use of flags and forced marches, the pressing of all to partake in what were seen as community actions were found across the country and across the century. If circumstances and actors varied from place to place and time to time, the underlying script remained remarkably similar. Food riots were seen by all involved, if in different ways, as a sort of morality play. To the regulators they represented the reassertion of justice in a context where wicked men had been allowed to exploit the poor at their weakest point, their absolute dependence upon the food supplied by the market. To the middling sort, they represented a warning of the dangers of not managing the markets, and the poor, effectively. And to the gentlemen they showed the dangers of allowing middlemen too much autonomy in the essential economy of provisioning. For all, the riots allowed them to develop stories and versions of stories within a powerful driving narrative that was familiar. Some chose to see food riots simply as evidence of the collapse of order. Some, like the burghers of Falmouth, saw rioters simply as criminals who stole and ransacked like the mobs of ancient times. Rioters were also accused, inaccurately, of murder. Some feared social anarchy. Dallaway claimed that ‘the common people are much inclined to a levelling spirit which we have learnt by the experience of former riots’, while ‘A Mobber’ claimed that some of his fellow rioters wished to have ‘down with some of the rich’ and were simply awaiting an opportunity to expropriate their social betters.¹¹⁷ Other commentators, however, though lacking his inside information, noted that the same rioters had rejected the money offered by the gentlemen of Trowbridge, ‘declaring that they wanted not that but bread for their children at a reasonable price’.¹¹⁸ Food rioters were frequently accused of stealing, and many did take advantage of the disorders to seize food without payment, while some clearly decided to use the cover of the riots to go in for more general theft and robbery. Yet John Pitt reported that they ‘would not suffer any of their party to commit any theft, as proof of which a woman complaining that she had lost some silver spoons, they mutually searched each other, and finding them in one of their pockets, they immediately brought him and lodged him in the county goal’. Dallaway too admitted that they ‘pilfered very little’. His summary will suffice for all: the mobbers, he noted, had committed ‘many acts of violence, some of wantonness and excess; and in other ¹¹⁷ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 17 September 1766; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 29 September 1766. ¹¹⁸ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 September 1766.
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instances of acts of courage, prudence, justice and a consistency towards that which they profess to obtain’.¹¹⁹ The theatre of food riots had many ‘victims’: the huckster who just happened to be the first to up his or her prices; the baker whose bread was seized; the small farmer and shopkeeper who saw the chance to make some money; the larger dealers and factors whose stockpiles were discovered and taken away. But rioters too paid a heavy price for their actions. Even where the ‘classic’ model was to be found, retribution was not slow to follow the restoration of ‘peace’. The morality play ended for some on the gallows. In Gloucestershire, three were hanged. Stephen Cratchley, the horn blower at Paganhill, played his part when he stated to the crowds assembled before the scaffold that he ‘hoped his countrymen would let the untimely fate of him and his companions have due influence on their minds’. Anselm Prinn, ‘a very ignorant lad, behaved with great decency’. The third man, Joseph Wildley, was ‘insensible’ with fever. In Wiltshire, James Kittlety, a Bradford on Avon weaver, disappointingly proved ‘perfectly resigned to his unhappy fate and died very penitent but would make no confession’.¹²⁰ Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, recorded after the hangings, ‘The common people in all the clothing counties are sufficiently frightened at the late executions.’ But not all. With food prices still rising, threatening letters and arson attacks continued to target forestallers. Tucker recommended that those prisoners remanded in gaol under sentence of death while awaiting the King’s pleasure should be made to publish an advertisement in the papers begging such perpetrators to stop, lest it prejudice their chances of reprieve. There were plenty of prisoners who might be held hostage in this way.¹²¹ Paternalism could be a nasty business. ¹¹⁹ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 20 September 1766. The story about the theft of spoons was remarkably replicated the following year concerning Cornish tinners. They ‘scourged’ their thief. Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvii (1767), 275. ¹²⁰ Gloucester Journal, 5, 12 January 1767; Bath Chronicle, 15 January 1767. ¹²¹ Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1766–69 (London, 1879), 151, Tucker to Shelburne, 11 January 1767.
6 Industrial Protest, Custom, and Law In 1720 the London tailors struck work over demands for a shorter day and a significant wage increase. Such strikes had long been illegal. Indeed, from 1305 parliaments had sought to proscribe collective action by workers, with prohibitions being repeated in the Statute of Artificers of 1563 and then in further legislation, as for example in 2 & 3 Edward VI, c.15, which forbade all workers from forming associations against their employers. The tailors displayed little concern for such laws. They were, at the start of the Hanoverian age, one of the best-organized combinations of labour in the capital. They regulated all employment through ‘houses of call’, alehouses where the trade maintained lists of accredited journeymen. Masters wishing to take on new labour had to come here and accept whomsoever they were allocated. The tailors made no pretence of poverty to justify their strike. Indeed, they marched en masse through the City to a dinner at the Merchant Taylors Hall where they consumed ‘fifty-six legs of mutton, a hundred and twelve fowls and quantities of cabbage and cucumber’. Faced with such bravado, the master tailors sought to break the strike by advertising for ‘country’ tailors to work for them. Such men were advised to register at new ‘houses of call’ which the masters had set up. The attempt did not last long. One such house, the Black Boy, soon abandoned the role when its publican was denounced as an ‘enemy of the trade’. A second, the Black Lion, persisted and was attacked by a large and angry crowd who attempted to demolish it. When order had eventually been restored, three tailors were taken up and charged with riot, while another forty were charged with conspiracy. However, they in turn counter-charged the masters with combining to reduce their wages. All were given bail. Law and raw labour power remained locked in dispute.¹ Faced with an impasse, the master tailors petitioned Parliament to intervene and in 1721 new legislation that sharply toughened the law against trade union organization was forthcoming. Just as the Riot Act transformed the old laws on riot, the ‘Tailors’ Combination Act’ of 1721, the first time the term ‘combination’ was used in legislation, significantly changed the direction of the law here too, extending the common law of conspiracy to include collective actions by workers ¹ For details of this dispute, see R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations 1717–1800 (Croom Helm, 1980), 62–3.
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if taken in pursuit of trade claims. The Act thus rendered actions, which were legal when taken by an individual, criminal if taken collectively. From this date onwards, the issue of conspiracy became central in the punishment of industrial disputes.² The Tailors’ Act presaged an extraordinary proliferation of legislation aimed at curbing trade unions, a clear indication of the increasing level of industrial conflict. Between 1721 until 1799 no fewer than eighteen further statutes, all including new prohibitions of combination, were to be passed, before Parliament approved the famous, or notorious, Combination Acts of 1799/1800.³ While the Tailors’ Act strengthened the penalties against combination, it also attempted to provide a means of independently regulating wages. The Act laid down that the quarter sessions should fix, on an annual basis, the weekly pay for tailors. These rates, in keeping with the old Tudor legislation for rating wages, were to be maximums. In neither respect can the Act be said to have been a success. The tailors’ union remained powerful into the next century,⁴ while the ‘maximum’ wage was regularly flouted. Masters, seeking the best workers, paid over price. Other journeymen would then demand the new higher rates for all. Strikes persisted. In the autumn of 1744 an extensive strike closed down nearly all the shops in the capital as 15,000 tailors stopped work and ‘threatened to fire the masters’ houses’. Armed with ‘bludgeons, pistols, cutlasses and other dangerous weapons’, the tailors, it was reported, ‘infest not only the private lanes but likewise the public streets’. Attempts to disperse them were repulsed.⁵ It seems that the men returned to work on the higher rates of pay. In 1751 further widespread conflict followed when journeymen demanded wages higher than those set by the sessions. This strike too was far from peaceful. The larger employers complained that the union had committed many Riots, Tumults, and Outrages; and some of them have sent Letters to the Master Taylors, threatening to murder them and fire their houses in case they would not comply with their illegal Demands, and have actually assaulted, beaten and abused some of them, to the great Terror of his Majesty’s faithful and loyal subjects.⁶
The tailors continued to demand, and receive, wages in excess of those laid down by the sessions for the rest of the century. The tailors’ strikes exemplify two aspects of industrial conflict in the eighteenth century. The first is the duality of the state’s involvement in industrial disputes. Since industrial disputes so often erupted from workplace onto the streets, as in the case of the tailors, they threatened the fragile preservation of law and order. Moreover, it was clearly subversive to good social order to have labour overtly ² J. V. Orth, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721–1906 (Oxford, 1991), 29–32; Dobson, Masters and Journeymen, 127–30. ³ For the complete list, see J. Moher, ‘From Suppression to Containment: Roots of Trade Union Law to 1825’, J. Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism 1750–1850: The Formative Years (Longman, 1988), 76. ⁴ Dobson, Masters and Journeymen, 62–3. ⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, xiv (1744), 505, 562–3. ⁶ London Gazette, xv–xix (1751), cited in Dobson, Masters and Journeymen, 65–6.
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dictating to employers. Here lay the reason for the increasing tide of punitive legislation. However, the state was also often drawn into a regulatory role. Since the medieval period, many aspects of labour relations and industrial production had been subject to specific pieces of regulatory legislation, passed in order to protect consumers or to safeguard the reputation of crucial export commodities.⁷ These provided a legal context within which many industrial disputes developed. Moreover, those involved in dispute, like the master tailors in 1720, frequently petitioned Parliament itself to intervene, by either passing new legislation or modifying existing laws. At the local agency level, therefore, magistrates frequently found themselves required both to enforce laws against combinations and to arbitrate in disputes between labour and employers. This ambiguity allowed for an interesting theatre of labour relations. The second point demonstrated by the tailors’ strike is the lack of a clear dividing line between industrial ‘action’ and industrial ‘protest’. The spread of their coordinated strike action into industrial ‘riot’ alerts us against simple bipolar models of early trade unionism such as that popularized by the Webbs. They defined a trade union as ‘a continuous association of wage earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of employment’, with an emphasis upon ‘continuous’, criteria that, they asserted, in the eighteenth century excluded all but the elite urban trades. Other manifestations of labour unrest were, they argued, merely ‘ephemeral combinations against their social superiors’, the product of particular pressures or circumstances, which were able to exert temporary pressure only through violence and disorder.⁸ This bipolar approach has been influential. Dobson, in his study of eighteenth-century combinations, emphasized the importance of the ‘level of organisation’ and the need for ‘a permanent base for continuous association’.⁹ Musson regarded the development of formal union organization as a reflection of labour ‘progress’: ‘The development of peaceful constitutional collective bargaining in place of crude violence was part of the process from primitive barbarism to a more civilised society.’¹⁰ And even Hobsbawm’s influential analysis of machine breaking in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was couched very much within the same model: what he termed ‘collective bargaining by riot’ was, he argued, a form of protest that occurred only where ‘organised unions hardly as yet existed’.¹¹ Such neat paradigms of ‘skilled’, ‘organized’, and ‘collective bargaining’ as against ‘unskilled/semi-skilled’, ‘disorganized’, and ‘riotous’ distort our understanding since the terms obscure as much as they illuminate. Take for example the idea of ‘skill’. Skills certainly underpinned combination: occupations requiring ⁷ In the case of the woollen industry, the oldest staple, there proved to be no less that seventy-eight separate acts regulating production when Parliament investigated the trade in 1806. ⁸ S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (Longmans Green, 1894, 1950 edn.), 1, 2. ⁹ Dobson, Masters and Journeymen, 16, 25. ¹⁰ A. E. Musson, British Trade Unions, 1800–1875 (Macmillan, 1972), 11,12. ¹¹ E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 7, 8.
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only physical strength stood little chance of sustaining any sort of bargaining position. However, the concept of ‘skill’ is not unproblematic, combining as it does not only market but also ‘moral’ values of worth. Skill certainly represents a combination of manual dexterity and knowledge, but it is also a socially constructed divisor of labour that reflects labour power in limiting the supply of competent workers in the field.¹² Skill therefore was not a simple linear scale. Setting up a loom for, and being able to weave, different and complex patterns was no less intrinsically ‘skilful’ than, say, making cabinets or waistcoats. It was the twin market forces of labour supply and consumer demand that shaped the potential rewards for such work. Some occupations were better able than others to manage their position in such a market. Apprenticeship, which is often taken as a shorthand for skill, likewise proves rather less robust as a simple divisor of eighteenth-century labour than some historians have been prepared to acknowledge. Formal apprenticeship through premiums and indentures was probably diminishing steadily across the century. One reason for this was the imposition in 1707 of stamp duty on formal indentures, which inevitably encouraged evasion and a decline in numbers taking up apprenticeships. Also, as population and the economy expanded, the formal binding of apprentices for anything from seven years upwards came under increasing pressure both from above, in that masters wanted a more rapidly expanding and cheaper workforce, and from below in that workers too wanted to enjoy increased freedom from older restrictions. Keith Snell, who has produced the most detailed and careful assessment of the question, notes that ‘the apprenticeship system changed under these conditions to a more short-term and strictly contractual means to train skilled workers.’ One aspect of this was that, even in the elite trades, apprenticeships became shorter in duration.¹³ In other trades, the practice being ‘brought up in the trade’, where the trade was learned directly from the parent, or uncle, without need for a premium, spread rapidly. This, for example, was the typical way in which most out-workers learned their trades. Indeed, in the woollen industry this model of ‘apprenticeship’ was accorded legal status equally strong as any ‘formal’ indenture. Even among the London trades, formal apprenticeship in the later eighteenth century was changing along similar lines, with many apprentices no longer housed and brought up as part of the master’s wider household. Increasingly apprentices were ‘clubbed out’ to live with their own families or boarded with someone else, becoming in effect poorly paid day labourers who combined relatively menial tasks with what was called in the later nineteenth century ‘learning on’.¹⁴ Apprenticeship, therefore, was far from monolithic. ¹² For a discussion of the social construction of ‘skill’ in the nineteenth century, see C. More, Skill and the English Working Class, 1870–1914 (Croom Helm, 1980). ¹³ K. Snell, The Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985), 256–7. See also J. Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (Croom Helm, 1981), ch. 4. ¹⁴ Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 256–63, 313.
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Government was certainly less concerned with the structures of labour organization than with its effects. This can be seen when we review the trades foregrounded in the Hanoverian state’s legislation against combinations. Of the eighteen acts proscribing combination passed between 1720 and 1796, each stimulated by particular disputes or sets of disputes, only three targeted what might be seen as elite urban craft trades, namely tailors (twice) and hatters. Of the others, five related to textile production and one to paper making, which, though a definite craft trade, was frequently semi-rural in location.¹⁵ The state therefore did not see combination as a problem confined to organized urban craft labour. Indeed, it was industrial protest rather than industrial organization which concerned the authorities. The latter was a matter for employers, the former a matter for the state since it threatened the peace. The real determinant in industrial conflict therefore was labour power. This was a function not merely of ‘skill’ or ‘organization’ but primarily of market demand and the ability and willingness of labour to contest and contend. The character of that contestation depended to a significant degree upon the numbers involved and upon the social and physical geography of the trade. Where numbers were small and work concentrated in relatively few locations, as was the case in many urban artisan trades, disputes might be resolved without ever spilling over into overt industrial protest. Where numbers were large but work was concentrated, or numbers large and work widespread, these different physical geographies necessarily shaped alternative responses. However, as important was the social geography within which work was carried out. As we shall see, a sense of community underpinned industrial protest in ways every bit as cohesive as in the case of food riots. Just as the London tailors demonstrated in 1720, labour protest was multidimensional. If we are to make sense of it, we must examine it within its context. HANDICRAFT TRADES Industrial conflicts in the shop-based urban craft trades were frequent in the eighteenth century, as the case of the tailors showed. Far from all have left any record and many were resolved without serious disruption.¹⁶ The relative weakness of small craft masters when faced with resolute craft groups meant many disputes did not come to full strikes. Craft workers might drop a ‘hint’, either in a ¹⁵ The acts are listed in Moher, ‘From Suppression to Containment’, 76. Nine acts referred to Ireland: three were general prohibitions, three referred more particularly to urban crafts and three to textile production. ¹⁶ Dobson suggests an average of three strikes per annum across the country in the years to 1767, but his list of strikes, heavily skewed towards London, misses many regional disputes. More recent research suggests that the national figure was far higher. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen, 26; cf. R.Wells, ‘Counting Riots in Eighteenth-Century England’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, xxxvii (1978), 68–72.
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tangential general request or in an anonymous note, letting the employer know what was demanded. Depending on the response, further action might be taken, all the while escalating the pressure short of outright strike action. This served two purposes: it meant that the workers continued to work and earn wages while ‘negotiations’ proceeded, and it obviated the danger that the laws against combinations or those concerning master and servant would be invoked. We can see this pattern in John Rule’s study of the Exeter woolsorters whose disputes in 1765, 1768, 1770, and 1787 revealed a careful appreciation of both relative strengths and a willingness to press their case with vigour.¹⁷ Given the numbers involved (Rule estimates there were forty members of the woolsorters’ Society in the town), such conflicts rarely resulted in public disorder. Those with the strongest industrial power might not need to involve themselves in industrial action at all. This was a point emphasized in a report in 1799 about the powerful Leeds cloth dressers: ‘To contend with the men in their now united state would be very imprudent in every master. They know and feel their power and it gains such accession by every struggle that it becomes a matter of discretion now not to attempt resistance.’¹⁸ But this was not always the case even here. A strike among the Leeds cloth dressers in 1743 spilled over into violence on the streets of Holbeck, an out-parish, as those on strike sought to extend the action. Three men were later charged with having ‘riotously, and tumultuously assembled’ and then, ‘in a Warlike manner, unlawfully, riotously and tumultuously incite, move and stir up other workmen and journeymen . . . not to make or do their work . . . at any lower or less rate than twelve pence for each day’s work’.¹⁹ The Yorkshire croppers, and their counterparts, the Wiltshire shearmen, certainly fit the Webbs’ criteria, both having a long and very effective history of combination. Yet, when they were threatened, as was shown in the years after 1800, both were quick to employ violence alongside ‘orthodox’ trade union sanctions to protect their trade.²⁰ This pattern is echoed in Clive Behagg’s study of the Birmingham artisan trades in the early nineteenth century.²¹ Not all ‘craft workers’, however, were employed in small units. Shipwrights, whose trade combined both skilled and heavy work, were employed in yards, some of which, as in the case of naval dockyards, employed many hundreds of men. Their trade prospered in wartime and, although it tended to contract in peace, a growing merchant marine meant that the shipwrights generally found themselves in a good bargaining position to maintain their living standards. ¹⁷ J. Rule, ‘Industrial Disputes, Wage Bargaining and the Moral Economy’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Macmillan, 2000), 171–6. ¹⁸ PRO, PC 1/43/A152, ‘Observations Respecting Combinations’. ¹⁹ H. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries from the Earliest Times up to the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1920), 316–17. ²⁰ A. J. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991), 131–48, 184–5. ²¹ C. Behagg, Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 1990), 66, 127–8, 139–40.
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They had long maintained strong combinations to protect their trade. Even where the government was their direct employer, there was little attempt to prosecute them. Given the critical need to maintain the fleet in sound order, particularly in wartime, government found it necessary to act with circumspection. Hence, in navy dockyards efficiency took second place to the need to retain shipwrights. Over-manning was deemed essential to ensure that there were always sufficient hands and here, unlike in private yards, older men were not turned off. Wages were lower, but the men were allowed ‘chips’, lengths of wood under six feet in length, which were ‘left over’ after construction. This perquisite was widely abused, with men breaking off early from work in order to saw up planks to just below the stipulated maximum for carrying home later. According to custom, men might only carry out chips under their arms but inevitably this was abused, often quite brazenly: ‘when the Lords of the Admiralty visited Chatham dockyard in 1749—there was ample warning of their coming—they saw with their own eyes large slabs being carried out.’²² If naval yard shipwrights were notorious for their lack of vigour at work, they were certainly ready to resist any threat to their incomes and customary rights. Here, working for large bureaucratic employers, subtle negotiation and minor pressure worked less well than outright defiance. For example, in August 1739 Chatham shipwrights struck work and massed outside the yard gates simply because five men, who had been deemed too slow at building a gun deck, had been fined. According to the admiralty, the shipwrights ‘cryed out Rights and Privileges’, resisting close supervision and insisting that customary practices be observed. But, characteristically, they also used the dispute to extend existing privileges, demanding that they ‘be allowed to carry their Chips out upon their Shoulders without unbinding them at the Gate; and that the Aged Men have the benefit of Working Extra’. This latter meant that they should receive more money for longer hours, though not necessarily for extra work. The wrights, it must be remembered, were in effect direct government employees. But they knew their bargaining strength. If they were not granted their demands, they warned, ‘We must seek our Bread elsewhere’. The navy gave in. The concession to the Chatham men led other yards to demand parity. These disputes were less amicably managed, with disturbances breaking out in Woolwich where ‘a parcell of young hott headed Fellows ripe for mischief ’ led the strike. Other disputes at Portsmouth in 1742 and Chatham in 1743 also saw disorder. The Portsmouth strike, where the Riot Act was read, was over men being fined for absenteeism and, although not solid, closed the yard for nine days until troops and an amnesty put an end to it.²³ Shipwrights elsewhere were equally forceful in protecting their trade. In 1757 the Woolwich men protested over attempts to regulate ‘chips’, while at Plymouth ²² D. A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), 322. See also Rule, Experience of Labour, 195–6, 128–30. ²³ Baugh, British Naval Administration, 324–6.
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shipwrights showed extraordinary determination to secure their ‘perquisites’. Marines in the dockyard seized the ‘bundles of chips which the shipwrights had made up’ and took them to the guardhouse. ‘Both sides drew up in line of battle, the shipwrights with adzes and axes, the marines with their muskets and bayonets fixed.’ The marines were forced to hand over their prize. And in 1784 Bristol shipwrights struck work in protest at attempts to cut their wages in the aftermath of war ‘from 3s a day to 2s 6d, the price given before the war’. The strikers assembled and prevented those ships ready to sail from leaving the port. The magistrates attempted to suppress ‘those tumultuous assemblies’ but the strike continued.²⁴ MINERS, KEELMEN, AND SAILORS Handicraft trades, even when employed in large numbers, had the advantage of close spatial proximity, which gave them the opportunity to utilize a range of modes of negotiation. Trades more geographically scattered had of necessity to employ different approaches. This was particularly true of the mining and transport industries. Miners everywhere had a deserved reputation for industrial protest. Arthur Young was speaking for most ‘respectable’ commentators when he noted, ‘miners in general, I might say universally, are a most tumultuous, sturdy set of people, greatly impatient of controul, very insolent, and much void of common industry.’²⁵ Yet the structure of ownership and the scale of enterprise varied widely from region to region and had a significant impact in shaping industrial conflict. The Northumberland and Durham coalfield was dominated by very large, capital-intensive mining concerns. Here miners were employed by annual contracts called the ‘bond’. For an initial outlay of sixpence or one shilling per man hired, this system guaranteed the mine owners the labour necessary to work their pit. For the collier, the system provided agreed rates for the various tasks performed, something of great importance in the mining industry where necessary exploration and shoring work took time but did not result in coal won, and also some protection from the press gang particularly active in the north-east. However, it did not provide him an assured income since there was no agreement to keep mines working throughout the year. Binding was conducted in October, much as agricultural labourers in the north continued to be hired at annual ‘mop’ fairs. The bond has been seen as smacking of serfdom. Indeed, the Gentleman’s Magazine referred to it as ‘a species of slavery not to be endured in a free country’²⁶ ²⁴ Dobson, Masters and Journeymen, 158; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxviii (1768), 196–7; Bath Chronicle, 7 October 1784. ²⁵ ‘Those employed in the lead mines of Craven and in many collieries, can scarcely, by any means, be kept to the performance of a regular business; upon the least disgust, they quit their service, and try another.’ A. Young, A Six Month’s Tour through the North of England (1771), ii. 261–2. ²⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxv (1765), 430.
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and it was a source of continued conflict until its abolition in 1844. However, this collective and annual system of determining employment also generated a strong sense of community since labour conditions were fixed more or less simultaneously for an entire coalfield. Such a collective focus reinforced the sense of common identity and comradeship which the dangerous life of working in the mines fostered everywhere. The miners therefore were able to use the bond to improve their collective terms of employment. This proved the case in 1765. The aftermath of the Seven Years War saw labour shortages in the north-east. In response, some Newcastle mine owners, no doubt under pressure from their men, had offered not the usual token shilling but between one and four guineas as ‘binding money’.²⁷ The scheme was clearly successful in that it attracted men from other pits and secured the best labour for those making the enhanced payment. This greatly alarmed other owners who feared it might lead to a general transfer of labour and to rising costs and, following discussions, an agreement was reached whereby ‘no owner should hire another’s men, unless they produced a certificate of leave from their last master’.²⁸ In effect, the new scheme aimed to tighten the dependency of the miner on his current master. The miners were not prepared to submit. As the period of the current bond drew towards its close, preparations for strike action were made and on 25 August a general strike was called. This date was, the miners believed, the first day after the expiry of their contracts, since it was customary for the bond to cover only eleven months and fifteen days in order to prevent the miners from acquiring poor law rights of settlement. The mine owners, arguing that many miners were bound by their contract until 11 November, the maximum period which by any interpretation any bond might cover, insisted that they resume work. However, neither attempts at coercion nor offers to abandon the certificate of leave scheme made any impact. The strike, observed by some 4,000 miners, proved extraordinarily solid. At only one pit, that run by a famously paternalist owner, did the men return and complete the disputed ‘extra’ days of the bond, apparently with the sanction of the other strikers.²⁹ The strike being so strong, there was little violence, though, when one mine owner attempted to reopen his mine, striking miners destroyed the pithead winding gear, thereby preventing any work taking place.³⁰ It was the sheer numerical scale and unity of the miners that prevented any determined counter-attack by the coal owners: one correspondent of the Earl of Northumberland admitted that, while it was clear that the men were in breach of the law, nothing could be done when faced with so many united men. In these circumstances a media war ensued, in which both sides laid out their cases. In London, the principal market for north-eastern coal, the balance of opinion was ²⁷ D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991), 412. ²⁸ Annual Register (1765), 130; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxv (1765), 430. ²⁹ Levine and Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society, 412–13. ³⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxv (1765), 442, 488.
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firmly on the side of the men and the London Chronicle advocated intervention by the Privy Council to settle the issue of wages. In fact the miners did not need external help. Their display of raw industrial muscle earned them enhanced wages at the subsequent bond hiring and there was no more talk of certificates of leave.³¹ The strike of 1765 enhanced the power of the miners and made them increasingly inclined to use collective bargaining. This is not to say that the miners were in any way pacific or disinclined to use industrial violence in furtherance of their aims. This was seen when a strike broke out in March 1789 when the men at Long Benton destroyed pithead gear and even set one pit on fire. At other collieries, too, pumping engines were smashed, thereby ensuring that all work ceased.³² Such actions confirmed the sense of fear with which they were regarded.³³ The miners of the north-east were fortunate in the fact that the main market for their coal, London, continued to grow steadily, which provided them with some real economic security. But their ace lay in the large-scale mining enterprises of their coalfield and in the Bond, both of which generated real cohesion. The mines in the Kingswood and Somerset coalfields, principally supplying the Bristol market, were generally small capitalist ventures and far more typical of coalfields in the rest of the country. With mine owners unable to maintain cartels like that in Northumberland, piecemeal disputes were both frequent and often violent. A dispute in October 1738, a year of major disturbance in the West, will serve as an example. Trouble broke out when some mine owners supplying the glass and brass producers cut their prices. In retaliation, other pit owners announced wage cuts from 16d. to 12d. a day. An immediate strike was called, endorsed by the various ‘colliers’ clubs’ meeting in alehouses around the coalfield. Mobile enforcement squads were set up to ensure that no coal was moved out of the district. Following a mass meeting at which the miners set out their demands, they marched to the house of one of the leading mine owners, ‘Squire’ Chester. He was not at home. The miners broke in and confiscated some of his ‘fine beef ’, which they then roasted on a large bonfire on his spreading lawns. It was an eloquently symbolic statement of their lack of deference. Groups marched into Bristol where they cut open coal sacks, while in Kingswood mining gear was destroyed and pits filled in. Travellers crossing the district were forced to pay tolls ‘to keep colliers alive’.³⁴ As the strike bit deeper, the miners moved still farther ³¹ For details of dispute, see Levine and Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society, 414–24. See also T. S. Ashton and J. Sykes, The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1929), 89–92; J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (Longman, 1917, 1979 edn.), 11–13. ³² Ashton and Sykes, The Coal Industry, 127. ³³ Their forceful defence of their economic interests may well have contributed to the general paucity of food riots in the north-east coalfields in the later eighteenth century, given that food dealers recognized that they were not to be trifled with. In this, miners in the region were very different from their fellows elsewhere who were notorious food rioters. A. Charlesworth and A. J. Randall, ‘Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766’, Past and Present, cxiv (1987), 204. ³⁴ Gloucester Journal, 17 October 1738; SP Dom., 36/46, Mayor of Bristol to Newcastle, 7, 9 October 1738. There was a certain irony in this levying of ‘tolls’, given the miners’ resistance to the imposition of tolls on the newly turnpiked roads some eleven years previously. See pp. 161–2.
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afield to preserve their ban on the movement of coal. In November they attacked Safford Lock on the Severn, leaving it ‘nearly destroyed’ and warning that ‘what they had done was nothing; the damage was to come; that at present they assembled in a small body, but when they came again they would be 1,000 strong’. A week later they warned that ‘if a bit of coal was carried up the river for the future they would destroy all the locks; for they had as good be hanged as they and their families starve.’³⁵ With food costs rising and winter coming on, the miners seem to have lost their battle. It was with good reason they were referred to as ‘a set of ungovernable people’.³⁶ Another group of workers whose spatial employment precluded more subtle means of conducting industrial disputes were the keelmen of the Tyne and Wear. These workers were employed to transport coal in ‘keels’, small flat-bottomed boats that plied the two main rivers of the region between staithes, or loading points, and the larger coastal collier ships that carried the coal to the London market. The structure of the trade was complex. On the Tyne the trade was run by employers called hostmen who owned the keels. They hired men called fitters who in turn employed three or four keelmen under a skipper to transport coal from the Newcastle collieries to South Shields where the coal was off-loaded. Like the miners of the region, the keelmen were employed by annual bond which fixed wages and conditions. While the keelmen’s trade can by classified as heavy manual, they had a surprising level of organization and had, by the end of the seventeenth century, not only established their own hospital scheme but also tried to secure incorporation as a means of self-protection.³⁷ Minor industrial disputes on the two rivers were frequent, but in 1750 a major strike broke out. This followed earlier conflicts which had been concluded, following arbitration by the justices, in 1744 in a series of Articles of Agreement, which systematized the terms of employment. By 1750 this agreement was being widely flouted. The keelmen claimed that boats were being overloaded, that the fitters were failing to pay either for loaders at the staithes, as agreed, or for the extra work involved in the ‘double’ lift necessary to load coal onto the larger seagoing vessels, and that they were failing to employ one man per keel as a skipper, replacing him with another labourer at much lower cost. Such ‘stirr’d keels’ were said to number two in every three craft on the river. So in March 1750 the men struck work and all coal movement ceased. This had a massive impact upon the ³⁵ Gloucester Journal, 29 November 1738. ³⁶ The best account of the Kingswood miners is R. W. Malcolmson, ‘ “A Set of Ungovernable People”: The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hutchinson, 1980), 85–127. ³⁷ The hospital, which was to provide for the sick and injured, was remarkable. Built in 1701, it was supported by the town corporation that provided the land and by subscriptions from the men of one penny per tide. However, the scheme was soon taken over by the hostmen, amid claims of misapplication, and efforts to regain control were successfully rebuffed. D. G. D. Isaac, Popular Disturbances in Britain, 1714–54 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1953), 79–81.
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developing heavy industrial economy of the river basin, in particular on the iron, glass, and salt works, and on the coastal coal trade. The mayor of Newcastle sought to reach a compromise and convened a meeting of fitters and keelmen at which the former agreed to abide by the 1744 agreement. The keelmen, however, were not persuaded and the strike continued. Sixteen strikers were imprisoned but peace still held. However, when attempts were made to employ scratch crews from tailors and labourers to man the keels, and to stop shopkeepers from advancing credit to strikers, violence erupted and lasted for three days until troops arrived.³⁸ Further large-scale strikes lead to disorder in 1765, in 1768, and again in 1809.³⁹ The keelmen at least all worked on the same rivers and had a common hiring date. Another group of transport workers, seamen, had exceptional difficulties in securing effective industrial pressure since their spatial diffusion could hardly have been more extensive. Seamen constituted a significant industrial group, employing perhaps around 100,000 men at mid-century, numerically inferior only to agricultural labourers, weavers, and miners. Diffused though they were, the mercantile marine was crucial for Britain’s eighteenth-century economy. While the strength of the Royal Navy steadily grew across the century, a direct result from William III’s decision to subordinate his Dutch fleet to that of his new kingdom, it was not men-of-war that paved the way for growing economic strength but the trade carried out in British merchant ‘bottoms’. Sailors were drawn not only from British ports but from all over the developing Empire and beyond, giving them a heterogeneity and toughness that made the ‘British tar’ a notoriously intractable citizen. Discipline while on voyage was harsh, akin to that on the Navy ships, since any challenge to authority could be classed as mutiny. Disputes, therefore, were mainly confined to periods when ships were in port and new contracts were awaited. But while quayside disputes between shipowners and crews were not infrequent, large-scale strikes were comparatively rare since men, with their ships, were highly mobile and might not be back in their ‘home’ ports for months at a time. However, in 1768 in London and in 1775 in Liverpool two major strikes broke out. These indicate the different ways in which disputes in the same industry might develop according to local circumstances. The London sailors’ strike of 1768 was set against the backdrop of deepening post-war depression, major industrial unrest in the capital, and the extensive political disturbances centring around Wilkes.⁴⁰ Large-scale demobilization following the end of the Seven Years War increased the number of seamen seeking ³⁸ SP Dom., 36/112, Mayor of Newcastle to Bedford, 30 April 1750; Isaac, Popular Disturbances, 90–1; Gentleman’s Magazine, xx (1750), 232–3. ³⁹ London General Evening Post, 7–9 June 1768, reported that 2,000 had ‘risen’ at Sunderland over a pay dispute. ‘A party of soldiers was sent from Newcastle but they were soon drove back.’ ⁴⁰ The best recent account of the strike is by Richard Sheldon, ‘The London Sailors’ Strike of 1768’, in A. Charlesworth, et al., An Atlas of Industrial Protest in Britain, 1750–1990 (Macmillan, 1996), 12–17. This account draws heavily upon it. For the disturbances connected to John Wilkes, see Chapter 8.
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work, while industrial stagnation was compounded by rapidly rising food prices, the result of severe harvest shortages. In London, as in many large towns and manufacturing districts, strikes erupted as workers sought to safeguard incomes. Seamen likewise sought to improve their pay. In May, seamen in Newcastle, North Shields, and Sunderland prevented coal ships sailing by unrigging them and held mass meetings to demand improved conditions from the shipowners. These were conceded since coal was in heavy demand in the London market where stocks had been denuded by a winter so fiercely cold that the Thames froze over. A similar attempt in Bristol, however, failed when the owners held firm. The slave trade had less incentive to settle.⁴¹ The dispute in London began on 1 May. Groups of seamen, many of them without work, boarded those ships preparing to sail and removed their rigging. Others waited upon the shipowners, demanding that increased rates of pay, 40s. per month for northern and eastern routes and 35s. for the western routes, be incorporated into new contracts. These and other grievances, most notably anger at the way in which men were turned off in foreign ports, were also put in a petition to Parliament, requesting that the legislature establish proper regulatory mechanisms to determine pay and conditions of service for seamen. Some London merchants, particularly those dependent upon seasonal trades, were desperate to settle, but others demanded that government use force to break the strike. Armed cutters were ordered to patrol the Pool of London, but there was a marked, and understandable, reluctance on the government’s part to provoke ‘a general riot on the river’. Meanwhile, newly arrived vessels were halted and unrigged as far away as Deptford. On 7 May a mass meeting of ‘many thousands’ of seamen took place on St George’s Fields, from whence they marched to St James’s Palace to deliver a petition to the King. Four days later an even larger demonstration was held. Bearing flags and marching in formation, the men converged on Stepney Fields before commencing a march on Westminster. They were turned back only after receiving assurances that their case was being favourably heard at the highest levels. However, the strike was spreading and the sailors were increasingly angry at the failure to secure a settlement. Seamen supported the coal heavers, men whose job was to unload the coal from the coastal coal ships, in enforcing a general stoppage of all unloading. There was some violence. Sailors, protesting outside the Royal Exchange, at one stage forced their way inside and occupied the building, while yet others seriously disrupted the capital’s major corn market at Mark Lane. Printed notices, setting out their case, were posted around the City and the mood became threatening: ‘there is Ships & Great Guns at Hand which we will use as Occasion shall require in Order to redress Ourselves.’ Contemporary politics also touched the dispute. One proclamation ended with the slogan, ‘No W[ilkes], No K[ing]’.⁴² ⁴¹ Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 28 May 1768. ⁴² E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991), 76–7.
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Within a week an agreement had been thrashed out. Owners and companies who needed their ships at sea were more ready to make concessions and by 12 May their vessels were once more rigged and readied for sail. But not all owners were so tractable and not all sailors could find work. This was not unusual but, following the successful militancy of the strike, it was harder to accept. Intertrade cooperation broke down when those involved in the coal trade found their boats could not sail since the strike of the coal heavers continued. When seamen on such vessels began to unload the coal, violence erupted.⁴³ This pattern, of conflicts in geographically extensive industries achieving success without disorder, only for disturbances to break out following their apparent settlement, was frequently repeated in other trades since enforcing agreements in diffuse industrial areas was extremely difficult. The Liverpool sailors’ strike of 1775⁴⁴ saw another aspect of seamen’s industrial action. Liverpool, with its large and accessible waterfront, was the fastest-growing port of eighteenth-century England, first rivalling and then overtaking Bristol as the central port in the triangular West Indies slave trade and emerging as the paramount port for the North American trade. Here, even more so than in London, deep-water sailors were to be found and their links with the privateering seaboard culture of the Caribbean and with the unfolding colonial tensions in America may have influenced their increasingly notorious militancy. A major strike had previously broken out there in 1762 at the height of a wartime boom when labour was scarce. Seamen sought in this propitious climate to increase wages. Lacking a prior organization, large-scale marches were held around the town with seamen following a man with a drum. The men demanded that no Englishman should be employed at less than 40s. a month and warned that ‘foreigners’ accepting less would not leave the town alive. The authorities arrested three ‘ringleaders’ on a charge of ‘attempting to raise a riot’ and sent them off to Lancaster gaol, but they were released en route by a crowd at Maghull. The sailors’ terms seem to have been generally complied with and peace returned. In 1775, however, the port was depressed. Hostilities in America disrupted that trade, while the Guinea trade was blighted by a government ban on the export of gunpowder. In August the whaling fleet was laid off. Employers, sensing a moment of labour weakness, chose this point to cut wages. The cuts were substantial: the first craft to figure in the dispute, the Derby, saw men offered merely 20s. a month for the voyage to Africa, not the previous 30s. The crew unrigged the vessel and struck work. The town’s authorities, acting rapidly, arrested nine men and locked them in the gaol. However, as news spread, a crowd of some 3,000 sailors, armed with handspikes and clubs, forced their release. A mass march of sailors, women, and boys, led by a red flag, promenaded the docks ⁴³ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxviii (1768), 245. ⁴⁴ The following account draws upon the only extensive coverage of the strike, that by R. B. Rose, ‘A Liverpool Sailors’ Strike in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, lxviii (1958), 85–92.
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and drew up before the Exchange building, the centre of the town’s commerce and the de facto town hall, where they demanded that the merchants should raise wages. They then marched off around the town. The strike was soon general. Ships were forcibly prevented from leaving and their crews pressed into joining the stoppage. Daily meetings held the men together and a determined leadership quickly emerged. The corporation, no doubt pressured by the merchants, decided to take a stand and hired men to protect the Exchange and to provide a force to confront the strikers. Since the nearest troops were stationed at Chester and Manchester, and the local constabulary was clearly ineffective against the sailors, such a measure had a certain attraction, but the move was seen as provocative and of dubious legality. Matters came to a head on the evening of 29 August when the hired defenders, stationed before the Exchange, opened fire on protesting sailors, killing some and wounding many more. Who initiated the violence and whether the Riot Act was read before the firing began were matters of later dispute, but it was generally agreed that the sailors had not possessed firearms. That situation soon changed. The next morning sailors broke into warehouses and gunsmiths’ stores and assembled a formidable arsenal of weapons, not least six cannon taken from the ships. These were manhandled into the town and, under the red flag again raised in defiance, used to bombard the Exchange. All resistance to them evaporated. With the town now in their possession, the seamen sought out the property of those whom they held responsible for the deaths of their comrades. One party, led by a drummer and a flag, systematically ransacked the homes of three merchants in the Guinea trade. Their furniture was ceremonially destroyed. The desperate merchants attempted to reach a negotiated settlement, without effect. It was two days before troops from Manchester arrived. Hearing that the sailors were prepared to resist them, they prudently waited outside the town until it was reported that the seamen had dispersed. At this point the sailors’ willingness to fight seems to have left them and large numbers were arrested. However, it seems probable that a modus vivendi had been reached, for only a dozen or so were eventually brought to court. Only eight true bills were found and these men were subsequently discharged on agreeing to enter the navy. THE TEXTILE TRADES While miners, keelmen, and seamen demonstrated the capacity of dispersed trades to resist attacks upon their trades, the most extensive and frequent resistance came from textile workers. Textile production was the pre-eminent manufacturing industry of the eighteenth century. Serge and worsted cloth was made in Devon and Somerset, in East Anglia, and in Yorkshire, woollens in Gloucestershire, in Wiltshire and Somerset, and again in Yorkshire. In the East Midlands the hosiery industry was the staple non-agrarian employer while in
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London, Coventry, Leek, and Macclesfield silk production grew steadily through the century. In south Yorkshire the linen weaving industry employed a large population, while in Lancashire the linen industry was steadily giving way to the newest and most vigorously growing textile industry of the period, cotton. The ways in which these industries were organized varied widely. The Devon and East Anglian trades were centred upon workshop production in towns, though increasingly production was slipping, as outwork, beyond the corporate control of the boroughs into the surrounding villages. Wealthy merchant families controlled the trade but smaller master workers retained significant autonomy. In Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Wiltshire the move away from corporate towns had already taken place. Here the outworking system, dominated by ‘gentlemen clothiers’, was highly refined. The Yorkshire worsted trade was run on similar lines but the older woollen trade of the county was organized around the ‘Domestic System’ where production, up to the finishing stages, was managed by small-scale master clothiers with the help of their families and journeymen. Silk weaving in London and Coventry, on the other hand, was dominated by merchants and master weavers, though as the century passed both saw economic power shifting into fewer hands. These variations in structure meant that the different textileproducing towns and districts exhibited sometimes quite divergent patterns of industrial relations. The urban textile workers of East Anglia and Devon were among the first labour groups to disturb the peace of Hanoverian England. In both regions, combinations of workers were potent forces, and in both industrial violence broke out in the decade following George’s accession in response to wage cuts. The declining industry at Colchester had a long history of popular protest. Interestingly, when trouble flared in March 1715, the weavers complained not only about price reductions and being paid in truck but also that their ‘privileges’ were under threat, in particular that their right of passage into the clothiers’ corporation was being closed. A general strike followed, which lasted through most of the month. The weavers’ demands were ignored until many hundreds of them marched into Town all armed with Pistols, Swords or Clubs and several other weapons, Resolutely bent upon pulling down the Bay Hall and Houses of several persons, threatening the lives of many unless their demands within two hours were granted.
The authorities fled and order was only restored when four troops of guards were sent to the town in April. The riot brought the problem to the attention of the government, and Sharp notes that the Privy Council showed ‘considerable delicacy in its handling of the incident’. Both sides were allowed to send petitions and in 1716 an Act that made some effort to satisfy both parties was passed.⁴⁵ ⁴⁵ The decline of the town’s industry was terminal and, although further disturbances broke out in the 1720s, they marked the end of industrial protests there. J. A. Sharp, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (Longman, 1984), 137–8; see also K. H. Burley, ‘A Note on a Labour Dispute in Early Eighteenth-Century Colchester’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xxix (1956), 220–30.
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Adverse trading conditions also affected the Devon serge industry where clothiers’ attempts to undermine piece rates led to a rapid growth of combination. In 1717 the mayors, corporations, and clothiers of Bradninch, Exeter, and Tiverton petitioned Parliament, complaining that ‘the woolcombers and weavers in those parts have been confederating how to incorporate themselves into a club: and have to the number of some thousands in this county, in a very riotous and tumultuous manner, exacted tribute from many.’⁴⁶ In October disturbances broke out in Exeter. Some three hundred weavers pulled down clothiers’ houses, smashed looms, and took away serge cloths. They ignored the magistrates who read the Riot Act and indeed wrote directly to the officer in charge of the soldiers stationed in the city, asking him ‘to stand neuter’. At the same time, they were keen to demonstrate their support for the Hanoverians by carrying around effigies of the royal family. Further riots broke out at Taunton where weavers repeated the intimidation of the clothiers.⁴⁷ Here there was much longer evidence of combination. As early as 1707 it was asserted that they possessed ‘a common seal, tip staff, and colours which they display at pleasure and meet as often as they think fit at the club house being an inn at Taunton’. The club was said to have ‘committed many outrages and riots’, including breaking imprisoned members out from the common gaol.⁴⁸ In 1720 renewed trouble broke out in Tiverton when clothiers there tried to use imported Irish combed wool, which would take work from the weavers’ wives and families. Wool lofts were ransacked and the Irish wool ceremonially burned. When the constables sought to restore order, they were attacked with weapons, including, it was said, firearms.⁴⁹ In 1725 riots broke out at Taunton and Crediton when weavers demanded better wages. The crowd at Crediton, led by a ‘captain’, forcibly liberated men who had been arrested and then drove off the magistrates. A more humiliating fate was meted out to the Taunton town clerk. When he attempted to read the Riot Act, the weavers ‘pulled off his hat and wig and put dirt upon his head’.⁵⁰ Clothiers across the West demanded action to curb these growing combinations,⁵¹ and Parliament responded with an Act that forbade combinations in the industry. Strikes were to be punished by heavy penalties while breaking into industrial ⁴⁶ House of Commons Journal, xviii. 715. ⁴⁷ SP Dom., 35/10, Graves to Secretary at War, 23 October; Mayor and corporation of Taunton to Graves, 21 October 1717. The attitudes of the Devon weavers in 1720 towards the magistrates was markedly different to that shown by their successors in the food riots at the end of the century. See pp. 118, 223. ⁴⁸ House of Commons Journal, xv. 312, 26 February, 1707, Petition from ‘principal inhabitants’. ⁴⁹ SP Dom., 35/11, Humble address to the King, 17 March 1720. ⁵⁰ House of Commons Journal, xv. 598, 602, 648. ⁵¹ In 1723 the clothiers of Exeter and Dartmouth petitioned against combinations of weavers, whereas in July 1725 the woolcombers of Alton were charged at the Winchester assizes of setting up a society with two supervisors and a bookkeeper under a common seal, and setting out by-laws controlling the right of entry into the trade. At Exeter the weavers’ club was accused of intimidating clothiers, in one case threatening to ‘cool-staff ’ him, or to parade him around the town on a staff, the traditional
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premises and the destruction of goods were both made subject to the death penalty or transportation. However, as earlier in Essex, the Act also urged the justices to utilize the old Elizabethan wage-fixing clauses at the Easter sessions to fix piece rates for the following year. Significantly, no clothier magistrate might be permitted to take part in this process.⁵² Both aspects of the Act were widely ignored. Disturbances were not confined to the towns. In late November 1726 conflicts broke out in Wiltshire. Here the putting out system meant that textile workers, though very numerous, were scattered over a wide area. Yet, in what was clearly a well-orchestrated move, large groups of weavers marched around the countryside and towns, claiming that the clothiers had cut piece rates, lengthened the warping bars, thereby adding an extra four or five yards onto every cloth without any additional remuneration, and were using false weights when weighing out warp yarn. Their aim was to enforce a general stoppage and to bring their grievances to the notice of the authorities. They found a sympathetic ear in the Trowbridge magistrate John Cooper. He urged them to set out their grievances and, when they complied, summoned a meeting of all the clothiers at which he presented the weavers’ case. The clothiers admitted that there had been abuses and agreed to end them. Cooper took this agreement to a mass meeting of the weavers. It seemed to satisfy the majority. However, two days later the premises of a Bradford-on-Avon clothier were destroyed while new riots broke out at Frome.⁵³ An alarmed government sent two commissioners into the West of England to investigate. Both proved remarkably supportive of the weavers and condemnatory of the clothiers. Giles Earle reported from Trowbridge that the weavers had rightful cause for complaint and had, in general, acted reasonably. The magistrates, he reported, were urging the weavers to petition Parliament for legal redress, but their wish to release on bail two men who had been arrested had been bitterly opposed by the clothiers who demanded severe punishments to deter future disorders.⁵⁴ His colleague, George Vaughan, reporting from Bath, was equally supportive of the weavers. He believed that magistrates and landowners generally were supporting the weavers because they feared the consequence of unemployment on parish poor rates. He also observed that a few ‘honest’ clothiers secretly supported the petitioning of government since only in this way would the unscrupulous punishment for blacklegs. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen, 30; Rule, ‘Industrial Disputes and the Moral Economy’, 177–9; Isaac, Popular Disturbances in Britain, 57–8. These same complaints echoed earlier ones from the weavers of Cornwall, on behalf of themselves and ‘many thousands’ in Wiltshire and Somerset, in 1718: PRO, SP Dom., 35/14, Petition of the weavers of Cornwall, 1718. ⁵² 12 Geo I, c.34. ⁵³ SP Dom., 35/63, Magistrates of Trowbridge to Newcastle, 17 December 1725; J. de L. Mann, ‘Clothiers and Weavers in Wiltshire in the Eighteenth Century’, in L. S. Pressnell (ed.), Studies in the Industrial Revolution Presented to T. S. Ashton (Athlone, 1960), 66–96. The weavers also claimed that the clothiers were seeking to incorporate themselves by act of Parliament, thereby cutting off all hope of weavers rising to become clothiers themselves, a fear that echoed those articulated in Colchester. ⁵⁴ SP Dom., 35/63, Reports from Giles Earle, 26, 28 December 1726.
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clothiers be forced to deal fairly. Vaughan had, with their advice, drafted a petition to the King.⁵⁵ Vaughan was instructed to promise that the weavers should have redress in the next session of Parliament, provided they returned to their homes and avoided further unrest.⁵⁶ Unfortunately, before this message could arrive, two more weavers had been arrested by a Bradford-on-Avon magistrate. It was widely believed that he acted under pressure from the leading clothier, Heylin, the weavers’ bête noire, who, on the outbreak of the dispute, had immediately cut his piece rates and announced that his workers could eat ‘pigwash’. Informed that local weavers intended to take clothiers hostage until their fellow workers were released, Cooper was forced to send the troops to the town. They were confronted by a mass of weavers. Shots were fired, three men were wounded, and the weavers fled in disarray.⁵⁷ Social relations were close to breakdown. Vaughan reported rumours that the Wiltshire weavers intended to call upon the Kingswood colliers for help, while, in the alehouses, radical rhetoric flourished.⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the petition generated huge support. Vaughan stated that weavers, behaving with ‘complete sobriety’, were flocking into Trowbridge from the surrounding districts to sign. Some 8,000, mainly ‘anabaptists or presbiterians’, had come forward on one day alone. For their part, the clothiers continued to exacerbate the situation. They sought to prevent shopkeepers giving credit to striking weavers and claimed the weavers were Jacobites. In response, the weavers were walking around with ‘KGW’, standing for ‘King George’s weavers’, in their hats. The clothiers brought forward prosecutions and even tried to have Earle arrested.⁵⁹ One of the two weavers whose arrest had triggered the disturbances, a man named Merricke, was released under government orders so that he might help with the presentation of the weavers’ case in London. He was clearly a leading figure in the weavers’ union. But the clothiers were determined to have their martyr. On his return from the capital, he was again arrested and tried at the assizes for riot. Found guilty, he was sentenced to death, only to be granted a royal pardon in March.⁶⁰ The Privy Council, considering the weavers’ petition in February, concluded that the weavers’ grievances were proven and severely upbraided the clothiers, though warning the weavers against further violence. Rather than legislation, the Council ⁵⁵ SP Dom., 35/63, Report of George Vaughan, 31 December 1726. ⁵⁶ In fact, the government was unusually solicitous of the welfare of the weavers: ‘His Majesty is always desirous the the Mildest Ways shou’d be used to quiet these Disturbances’, Townshend wrote to Vaughan. The King was ‘very much against’ using troops against the striking weavers and ‘would have no gentle ways omitted’ in reaching a settlement. PRO SP 44/81, Townshend to Vaughan, n.d. ⁵⁷ SP Dom., 35/64, Cooper to Earle, 4 January 1727. ⁵⁸ Ibid. Vaughan to Newcastle, 2 January 1727; Gloucester Journal, 27 February 1739, letter from William Temple. Reports spoke of references to Wat Tyler and Jack Straw while the phrase, ‘Adam made no will’, indicating that the basis of property was theft, was being widely discussed. ⁵⁹ SP Dom., 35/64, Vaughan to Newcastle, 2 January 1727. ⁶⁰ Ibid., petition of W. Merricke to the King, March 1727.
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offered an ‘Agreement’ which stipulated the size and weight of warping bars and measures and insisted that future disputes were to be settled by arbitration by the bench. This agreement lasted less than a few months. Although it is probable that the bench set rates, by June 1727 rioters were again roaming Trowbridge attacking the property of those clothiers who again reduced piece rates.⁶¹ Weavers elsewhere in the West noted the events in Wiltshire. In Stroudwater in Gloucestershire the weavers turned to the bench and asked them to fix piece rates, which the bench duly did. However, here too clothiers ignored their decisions and disturbances broke out in July 1727. In 1738 at Tiverton weavers attacked a publican who had been buying up cloths rejected as defective by clothiers and then selling them at reduced prices, something explicitly banned by the Wiltshire ‘Agreement’. The man was ‘coolstaffed’ (carried on a warping bar) across the town to the mayor’s house. A fight with the constables broke out and one weaver was killed.⁶² Weavers at Bristol likewise sought to use the bench to secure an increase in rates in 1729. When they failed to act, riots broke out in October, with the houses of two clothiers coming under particular attack.⁶³ Government had proved surprisingly sympathetic towards disgruntled weavers in the first two decades of Hanoverian rule. That was to change abruptly when major disturbances broke out again in Wiltshire in 1738. Food prices were rising and a recession was causing widespread unemployment when a Melksham clothier, Henry Coulthurst, chose to cut his piece rates and force his employees to take truck in lieu of wages. His actions constituted a challenge to every weaver in the district since, if he succeeded, other clothiers would follow suit. On 27 November, a mass meeting of weavers at Trowbridge heard that Coulthurst was paying his weavers only ‘Ten Pence Halfpenny and One Shilling per Yard’ when the statutory rate, set in 1726, was 14d. They resolved to strike and to destroy the cloths on any loom working under-price. The following day a large, growing crowd marched to Melksham. Coulthurst, hearing of their arrival, sent messages promising that henceforward he would pay full rates. The weavers’ leaders demanded that he sign a proper agreement to this effect, but Coulthurst had fled and could not be found. The crowd marched to his mill where they were met by ‘Mr Aland, a Sheargrinder, who used all possible means to appease them . . . by offering his bond for any sum, or his person as a hostage’. The weavers were not placated and broke open the doors, and drove in the windows . . . (they) beat to pieces and destroyed great part of the Household Goods, Partitions and Wainscotes, drank, carried out, and spilt, all the Beer, Rum, Wine and Brandy in the cellars, and staved in all the casks that contained them. ⁶¹ Isaac, Popular Disturbances, 70. ⁶² Mann, Cloth Industry in the West of England, 111; M. Harding, The History of Tiverton (1845), i. 107. ⁶³ PRO, SP Dom., 36/15, Mayor of Bristol to Newcastle, 6 October 1729. Some twenty-five were charged under the 1726 Act against Combinations at the assizes. SP Dom., 36/15, Attorney General to Yorke, December 1729.
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They then attacked some neighbouring cottages owned by Coulthurst, departing only when darkness fell. One local man, John Crabb, over-eager to complete the destruction, was left behind and captured by ‘some honest neighbours’. He was hauled before the Chippenham magistrate who immediately imprisoned him. The next day, weavers again gathered on the outskirts of Melksham, demanding Crabb’s release. They received support from the Melksham clothiers, now desperate to appease the weavers, but the justices were adamant that Crabb should stay in gaol. The clothiers then provided beer and food. If this generosity protected their looms, it did not deflect anger from the still-absent Coulthurst. Their picnic completed, the weavers marched to his house, stating that they would ‘reduce it to the condition of the city of Jerusalem viz. that of them there should not remain one stone upon another’. The house was first untiled and then steadily reduced to rubble. The destruction complete, the weavers returned to the town centre where they were again ‘treated’ by the clothiers. The next day they returned, but, convinced the strike was complete, went home to enjoy the rest of the weekend. The arrival of troops put paid to further marches. The riots, however, had a salutary effect well beyond Melksham. The Trowbridge clothiers were so frightened that ‘they ordered the Crier to give public notice that the journeymen should have full wages and no truck’. It was tantamount to an admission that many had been ignoring the directive from the Privy Council in 1727 that all work should be paid in cash. The government and local magistrates were not disposed towards mercy this time. Men were rapidly taken up and eventually thirteen were tried at assizes for their parts in the disturbances. Three were sentenced to death, including Thomas Beazer, whose confession we noted earlier. John Crabb, caught en flagrante, likewise blamed the excitements of the day and pressure from others for his actions, stating that ‘by many entreaties and the disappointment of friends . . . (he) was induced to accompany them in their desperate design’. Like Beazer, he complained that false evidence had been given against him to ensure his conviction. Nine others were convicted on lesser charges and imprisoned for a year. Only one man was acquitted.⁶⁴ The Melksham riots set off an extraordinary debate in the pages of the Gloucester Journal between, on the one side, Thomas Andrews, a paternalist magistrate who took delight in exposing the duplicity of the clothiers, and, on the other, William Temple, a clothier whose excoriating diatribes against the woollen workers, gentry, and any magistrate who took the part of the protesters established a new depth of bitterness in the industrial and social relations of the region.⁶⁵ If ⁶⁴ The sentences handed out at the assizes pleased the clothiers. ‘They are returning home full of hopes that from the examples that will be made of the rioters, they and their families may be enabled to carry out their business and enjoy their properties in safety.’ PRO, SP Dom., 36/47, Holland to Newcastle, 17 March 1739. ⁶⁵ The correspondence appeared in the Gloucester Journal, 19 December 1738; 9 January, 7, 27 February 1739.
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this debate ended without resolution, Temple’s vituperation appears to have cowed the Wiltshire bench, which thereafter rarely chose to confront the clothiers. The increased tendency to place active clothiers onto the commission in the woollen districts further shifted the balance. It was not a change all approved of. An anonymous correspondent to Lord Harrington, Secretary of State for the Northern department, complained that, in the aftermath the Melksham riots, clothiers were beating down the wages of the poor and paying them in bread, cheese, meat, linen and woollen cloth and so forth all at a price at least one third more than the real value, by which means the poor manufacturer is obliged to slight his work and consequently make a bad commodity.
Justice in some places was fatally compromised: At Westbury Leigh there are two Brothers who are Clothiers and Justices whose father and mother were poor folks in the woollen manufacture. These two Justices graze their cattle on their own lands, employ their own people to kill them and then pay it at a high price to their work folk for their labour; and contrary to an old Law have of their own tyrannical wills built a small prison near them in terror of the poor . . . wherever a tradesman is made a justice, a tyrant is created. It would be as rational to make a shepherd of a wolf as to make a Justice of a Clothier.⁶⁶
In Wiltshire the wolves increasingly took over the shepherd’s staff. Andrews had argued cogently that it was necessary for the authorities to intervene in such disputes and to ‘use all possible means to redress all true grievances of the people’.⁶⁷ This paternalist notion that the rulers owed the ruled some sort of protection from unscrupulous economic power was a view shared by a large percentage of the textile workforce who continued to seek state intervention in managing industrial conflicts. We can take two cases as examples: the Spitalfields silk weavers and the framework knitters of the East Midlands. Silk weaving was one of the capital’s largest trades. Leonard Schwarz, the leading historian of eighteenth-century London, has estimated that there were perhaps as many as 10,000 looms and 50,000 people involved in the trade by the end of the century, one in ten of the population.⁶⁸ They were mostly outworkers, using their own or contractors’ looms so that, while they were grouped in tight communities such as Spitalfields, maintaining any control over their trade was hard. Although, at its finest end, silk weaving was a skilled trade, many women and children were employed, by their husbands and others, in garrets making simple goods. Yet, for all their apparent industrial weakness, the silk weavers remained an industrial force to be reckoned with. They fomented extensive riots against the increasing use of calico in 1719 and in 1736 rioted over the employment of Irish ⁶⁶ SP Dom., 36/47, ‘Englishman’ to Harrington, February 1739. ⁶⁷ Gloucester Journal, 9 December 1739. ⁶⁸ L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1992), 36.
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immigrants.⁶⁹ However, in the 1760s a new series of conflicts that saw a range of tactics being employed broke out. Behind them were two linked issues: the weavers’ wish to protect their trade from foreign competition, an aspiration shared with their employers; and a desire to protect their incomes through regulation of piece rates, something that the employers were much less keen on. The Seven Years War blocked French silk imports and, with demand increasing, in 1762 the weavers attempted to secure increased wages. Proposed prices for different sorts of work were ‘inserted in a Book, which they have caused to be printed and delivered to each Master’. When this was rejected, many weavers struck work and a crowd of 2,000 weavers destroyed looms and silks. The Guards had to be called out to restore order, but it seems that the violence paid off, since in 1767 the prices established in 1762 were referred to as the norm.⁷⁰ The silk weavers well recognized, however, that industrial muscle alone would not secure wage stability or protection from cheaper imports. The end of the war threatened to undermine their security. Having failed to persuade their masters to petition Parliament to prohibit imported silk, in 1765 the weavers determined to do it themselves and, ‘with drums beating and banners flying’, marched on Westminster to present their own petition. Although MPs were alarmed and troops rushed to the Palace, the weavers did little damage beyond smashing some windows. Their case for prohibition was rejected. In the summer of 1765 a crowd of weavers marched to Richmond to petition the King in person. When he agreed to help, ‘they returned pleased and orderly’, but again legislation was rejected, this time in the Lords. The weavers, now numbering some 8,000 and bearing black flags, again surrounded Parliament and subjected the peers to abuse and some physical violence. Thereafter they paraded the streets in a show of force, attacking the house of the Duke of Bedford, whom they blamed for their failure. With the masters supporting prohibition, the bill was eventually passed.⁷¹ However, falling demand and profits encouraged some masters to undercut the agreed rates. In 1767 violence erupted when some 2,000 weavers, disguised as sailors and armed with cutlasses, broke into the homes of under-price journeymen and cut the silk from the looms. They also publicly burned the effigy of one master. Although the practice of ‘cutting’ was made a capital offence in the 1765 bill that banned imports of French silks, it failed to stop the attacks, which continued steadily into 1768. Many looms were destroyed and silks cut up. In 1767 some masters and weavers appealed to Weavers’ Company to enforce the prices agreed in 1762. The Court of the Company, blaming ‘the late disturbances
⁶⁹ D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925: Penguin 1966 edn.), 124, 182. ⁷⁰ A. Plummer, The London Weavers’ Company (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 321–2; Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, 204. ⁷¹ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxv (1765), 244.
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in the Trade’ on unscrupulous masters who cut rates, agreed and printed the list in the press. However, it had little effect.⁷² As industrial relations worsened, the old hostility between single loom and engine loom weavers once more erupted into violence,⁷³ while weavers, ‘armed with cutlasses, pistols, etc. and in disguise’, attacked houses and destroyed sixteen looms belonging to a manufacturer of fancy goods. The ‘Cutters’, now forming themselves into a sort of club, also began to levy fines upon masters based on the number of looms they owned.⁷⁴ Late in 1768 an agreement on prices was reached between some of the masters and the weavers, but the Middlesex bench refused to endorse it. The Cutters resumed their activities. A new club, calling itself the ‘Bold Defiance’, once more started levying contributions on employers. ‘Mr Hill, you are desired to sent the full donation of all your looms to the Dolphin in Cock Lane. This from the conquering and Bold defiance to be levied at four shillings a loom.’ The justices, on learning where the club met, raided the alehouse, killed two men, and arrested others, including two leaders of the group. They were hanged in front of a large crowd at Bethnal Green. A man who gave evidence against them was later stoned to death.⁷⁵ However, when in 1773 disorders again broke out and Parliament was again petitioned to establish machinery for fixing wages, matters had changed. Now the weavers’ petition had the support of the Lord Mayor and Sir John Fielding, who predicted that ‘the masters will have more reason to rejoice than the men as it frees them from their outrages’. It would, he hoped, also ‘turn the journeymen weavers’ road from the Palace to the Quarter Sessions’. The Spitalfields Act was passed that year. It allowed the bench to fix rates on an annual basis. The effects of the Act were remarkable. Fielding had hoped this would ‘prove a radical cure for all tumultuous meetings from that quarter’ and so it proved. As Plummer states, ‘the Act of 1773 replaced a decade of discord and violence, crime and punishment by a half century of comparative calm, orderly negotiations and, on the whole, fair rates of pay; a transformation greatly envied by weavers in other parts of the country, such as Coventry and Macclesfield.’⁷⁶ ⁷² Plummer, The London Weavers’ Company, 323: G. Rudé, The Crowd in History (Lawrence and Wishart, 1964, 1981 edn.), 72–3. ⁷³ ‘A body of weavers, armed with rusty swords, pistols and other offensive weapons, assembled at a house on Saffron-hill with an intent to destroy the work of an eminent weaver near that place, but were happily dispersed . . . it appeared that two classes of weavers were mutually combined to distress each other, namely the engine and narrow weavers. . . . The men who were taken up were engine weavers and they urged . . . that they only assembled in order to protect themselves from a party of the others.’ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvii (1767), 606. ⁷⁴ Plommer, The London Weavers’ Company, 323–4. ⁷⁵ Rudé, The Crowd in History, 74–6; Plummer, The London Weavers’ Company, 324–6. ⁷⁶ Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, 223; Plummer, The London Weavers’ Company, 328–9, 330. Coventry weavers were not adverse to violence. In 1772 when one master attempted to reduce prices, ‘a great Mob to the Number of near 1,000 . . . assembled by Fife and Drum’. The crowd announced that they intended to ‘pull down his House & to demolish him, if they could
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The framework knitters of the East Midlands found themselves faced with similar problems. Like silk, the hosiery industry catered for a market subject to abrupt fashion swings, and it was hard, in an outworking industry, to maintain any control over wages when faced with under-cutting employers. They too therefore sought agreements to place a secure base under piece rates. Attempts to persuade the hosiers to hold to a list of prices failed and in early 1778 framework knitters across the country, not only from the East Midlands but also from Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, and London, sent petitions to Parliament seeking leave to bring a bill that would establish a legal framework for settling wages on the lines established by the Spitalfields Act. They were rejected.⁷⁷ Whereas Parliament had reason to fear riots in Spitalfields, the Midlands was sufficiently remote to be ignored. The knitters did not give up. Money for a new petition was collected in the form of a toll levied upon each frame by village committees and then transferred to a central committee of Associated Framework Knitters, which managed the campaign.⁷⁸ Moreover, parliamentary elections allowed the knitters who had a vote in Nottingham to mobilize in the city and to press candidates for their support. Some hosiers were also supportive of regulation.⁷⁹ Thus when in May 1779 the petition was presented, leave was given to introduce a bill to regulate ‘the Business of Framework Knitting’. The measure went through a first reading but was then easily defeated when hostile Nottingham hosiers enlisted the help of members representing corrupt Cornish boroughs. The sympathetic Nottingham Journal recorded the defeat, ‘to the great joy of many master-stockingers and to the inexpressible affliction of hundreds of poor stockingers who crowded the lobby in expectation of hearing that the bill for their relief had passed’.⁸⁰ As news of their failure reached the Midlands, men and women began to pour into Nottingham to express their anger. A leading opponent of the bill, a Mr Need, was particularly targeted, having his windows, shutters, and roof tiles smashed but many others sustained lesser damage. The next day crowds again took to the streets, smashing hosiers’ windows and attacking their property until dragoons dispersed them, while attempts were made to set fire to mills owned by both Arkwright and Need. In the days that followed, all work ceased but skirmishes continued. Seriously alarmed, hosiers’ representatives met with stockingers’ leaders to try to thrash out a collective agreement, but a five-hour meeting resulted only in more acrimony. While a diversionary attack on Need’s factory took place, a large crowd meet with him’. The authorities attempted to parley with them, ‘but without Effect, and by throwing Stones and breaking his Windows, they began to carry their Purpose into Execution’. PRO, WO 40, Mayor and corporation to My Lord, 7 July 1772, cited in Thompson, Customs in Common, 69–70. ⁷⁷ House of Commons Journal, xxxvi. 635, 727–8 (23, 25 February 1778). ⁷⁸ Nottingham Journal, 15 August 1778. ⁷⁹ Ibid., 29 August, 3 October 1778. ⁸⁰ House of Commons Journal, xxxvii. 635, 728, 740, 742 (23 May 1779); Nottingham Journal, 12 June 1779.
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marched to the village of Arnold where he owned a house and a large workshop. The house was wrecked and fifty frames destroyed. They also burned down the home of a hosier who had given evidence against the bill before Parliament.⁸¹ In alarm, hosiers now undertook, ‘provided an immediate cessation of violence took place, to remove every oppression from their workmen, and to bring all manufacturers up to a fair price, not the highest rate, but the best generally given’.⁸² As the Hammonds note, ‘Rioting in fact had proved more successful than applications to Parliament.’⁸³ The agreed list seems to have provided some security for a while and a further list was agreed in 1787.⁸⁴ Significantly, those taken up for their parts in these disorders were treated with leniency. Henson, commenting upon these events in the aftermath of the far more serious Luddite disorders, believed that the bench chose to treat the rioters as naughty children.⁸⁵ In reality, the short sentences and fines imposed reflected both sympathy for the stockingers and a recognition that punitive sanctions might further inflame an already dangerous situation.
CONCLUSION The foregoing review of labour protest suggests some general conclusions. While clearly the key to the determination of industrial conflicts was the power of labour vis-à-vis capital, a balance that itself changed with circumstances, what emerges is suggestive rather more of commonalities than of differences. First, it is clear that, when we are dealing with trades other than small elite crafts, simple bipolar models of combination divided into ‘organized/negotiation’ and ‘unorganized/violence’ categories will not stand scrutiny. Industrial violence or protest was not necessarily the recourse of the weak. Tailors and shipwrights, both fitting the ‘continuous association’ model, were perfectly prepared to protect their trades using violence, as were the cloth dressers. Nor were those groups that frequently protested devoid of organization. The miners and keelmen of the North-east maintained no discernible permanent combination, but every year at the bond they proved to be formidably organized. Seamen were almost impossible to ‘organize’ on any permanent basis but their strikes revealed potent organizational ability. Urban weavers in Devon, Essex, and Somerset were famously organized into ‘clubs’. Yet it is also evident that outworking weavers in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire also had their own organizations. William Temple, the Trowbridge clothier, claimed in 1738, ‘The manufacturers have stocks raised by ⁸¹ Ibid., 19 June 1779; Leeds Mercury, 15, 22 June 1779. ⁸² W. Felkin, History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (1867; David and Charles, 1967 edn.), 229. ⁸³ Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, 183. ⁸⁴ Felkin, History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery, 230. ⁸⁵ G. Henson, History of the Framework Knitters (1831; David and Charles, 1970), 415.
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their Clubbing, sufficient to carry on Prosecutions of any kind, being several hundred pounds capital.’⁸⁶ In both counties, county-wide combinations of weavers periodically emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only for these apparently to disappear as quickly as they arose. The same was true of the framework knitters of the East Midlands. Yet, it is hard to claim that these were merely ‘ephemeral’ constructs. In fact, they represented federations, which, if temporary, rested upon local organizations that had a much more permanent, if loose, existence within the local community.⁸⁷ Second, here, as in other spheres, the term ‘riot’ disguises as much as it reveals. Industrial riots rarely degenerated into general destruction of employers’ property, principally because, once the crisis had passed, those same workers and employers would remain mutually dependent. Destruction was usually confined to specific targets, namely those individuals who threatened customary industrial practices or piece rates. The Melksham riots, usually depicted as little more than a destructive rampage, prove to have been targeted solely at one clothier. It is a moot point whether, had Coulthurst chosen to meet the Trowbridge weavers and sign their paper, his property might even then have been spared. Noticeably, violence was rarely directed against obnoxious employers’ persons, only their property: destroyed property might be replaced; employers who abandoned the trade might not. Finally, in many strikes violence was greatest either when fellow workers were persuaded back to work against the collective will or when disputes appeared to have ended in success for the workers, only for them to find that not all employers were going to observe the results. Third, in almost all industrial disputes, protestors had at least one eye on the local bench. This was not merely because the justices were the guardians of law and order. In many cases protesting labour groups looked to the bench as a means of indirectly negotiating with employers. The bench also provided a direct route to government, which could provide the legislative safeguards that all believed were the most effectual defences of custom. Labouring groups expected the bench to behave in an independent and even-handed manner in dealing with industrial conflicts. As in the case of food riots, they saw it as the justices’ task to ensure that rapacious capitalism did not overwhelm community rights. That such appeals to ‘community’ values echoed those expressed in food riots is hardly surprising. While, as John Rule has shown,⁸⁸ a ‘craft’ consciousness might determine the mentalité of those in the elite trades, for most industrial workers a ‘community’ consciousness predominated, reflecting the fact that their trades frequently made up the mainstay of the local community. Industrial grievances were therefore often community grievances, and industrial customs community ones. That community involvement was emphasized in the collective character of many strikes. Mass meetings and mass marches both held together strikers and ⁸⁶ Gloucester Journal, 10 April 1739. ⁸⁷ For a discussion of weavers’ unions and organization, see Randall, Before the Luddites, 196–7. ⁸⁸ Rule, ‘Industrial Disputes, Wage Bargaining and Moral Economy’, 166–84.
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also spread the message of the dispute. Summoned by horns and led by flags, drums, and fifes, just as food-rioting crowds were, these marches were also powerful theatrical displays, impressing bystanders and allowing the impressment of waverers into the protest. Workers were keen to win over and retain public opinion, if only as a means to increase pressure upon their employers. The Wiltshire weavers in 1726 and 1738 were clearly assiduous in getting their views heard by public, government agents, and bench alike. The north-east miners even made use of the London press, the main market for their coal, in their dispute in 1765. In so doing, the protesters were creating and disseminating ‘stories’ that reflected their own perspective upon both their own histories and their current problems. That public relations war was actively fought by employers too, though their approach, epitomized by Temple, was frequently highly choleric. In constructing this self-vision, it is significant that, while workers were prepared to recognize the origin of some of their problems in terms of market difficulties, they were not willing to accept the ‘modern’ notion that labour was merely a commodity within that market. There was also continuing resistance to attempts by employers to exclude workers from economic advancement, as was shown by the fears of weavers in both the West and East Anglia in the early years of Hanoverian rule that clothiers intend to petition for incorporation.⁸⁹ Although the chances of economic progress from labourer to employer were slight, they were prized as part of an open society. By the last decades of the century such hopes were much reduced but had not disappeared entirely, as we shall see. Many of these characteristics can be seen in one last case study, that of the Gloucestershire weavers in 1755–6, when they faced determined attempts by the clothiers to cut piece rates and employ men ‘not brought up in the trade’.⁹⁰ The Gloucestershire weavers’ reaction to these problems was conditioned by their earlier experiences of conflict, in particular that in 1726–7. Then similar attempts had led to six weeks of disturbances. However, the local gentry, supported by the bench, had made major efforts to support the weavers’ claims, if not their methods, and pressed the government to strengthen legislation against truck and other abuses. Parliament confirmed the right of the bench to fix rates and in 1728 the Gloucestershire quarter sessions had duly done so. Moreover, it also attempted to punish clothiers who refused to pay them. The clothiers, who continually adjourned such cases to higher courts, undermined the process but the example, and the support offered by the bench, was remembered. Therefore the weavers’ first response to wage cuts in 1755 was a direct appeal to sympathetic justices. They advised the weavers to use the existing machinery. However, the sessions, pressurized by the clothiers, proved reluctant to act, so the weavers, clearly with the support of some magistrates, set about drawing up a petition to ⁸⁹ J. de L. Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1660 to 1880 (Clarendon Press, 1971), 111; Burley, ‘A Note on a Labour Dispute’, 220–30. ⁹⁰ The following draws upon my article, ‘The Industrial Moral Economy of the Gloucestershire Weavers in the Eighteenth Century’, in Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 1750–1850, 29–51.
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Parliament. They sought a bill to empower the bench both to set rates and summarily punish those who flouted its decision. Parliament agreed and the new Act passed in time to allow the 1756 Michaelmas sessions to set a rate.⁹¹ The clothiers were taken by surprise by the passage of the bill and shocked to discover that the bench intended to take it seriously. They launched a ferocious propaganda campaign, arguing that regulation was impracticable, damaging, and likely to result in the decay of the trade.⁹² The quarter sessions, clearly divided, decided to shelve a decision. The weavers, frustrated at the delay, therefore struck work. Across the entire county weavers stopped work in a remarkable demonstration of unity. The clothiers claimed that the strike was violent but, while weavers held daily meetings in many places, there was little evidence of any disorder. Support came not only from many gentlemen but also from the Gloucester Journal, which continued to urge negotiation. Soldiers were dispatched to the woollen districts in case of disorder, but their commander, the young James Wolfe, was full of admiration for the weavers’ forbearance.⁹³ Two attempts were made to settle the strike. While the majority of the clothiers stood out, some were prepared to agree terms and a hastily reconvened bench ratified a new comprehensive set of rates on 6 November.⁹⁴ This marked a triumph for the weavers. They had worked within due constitutional process, obtained an Act of Parliament, and, through their use of restrained but determined industrial action, had forced the local authorities to make it work. The clothiers had much less respect for constitutional processes. Many simply refused to pay the rates. Their weavers therefore stayed out on strike into December. Resources were clearly stretched but, while violence broke out when men some returned to work ‘under price’, most refused to be cowed. The clothiers’ intransigence was broken by a masterstroke. The weavers took two leading clothiers to court for non-compliance with the rate. Remarkably, they won the case. The shock of seeing their most respectable and wealthy leaders so treated was palpable. The clothiers gave way. But secretly they began to marshal their resources to destroy the legislation. Assiduous lobbying secured repeal in March 1757.⁹⁵ The Gloucestershire weavers’ campaign emphasizes the importance of the local authorities in shaping the pattern of industrial relations. The Gloucestershire bench, as was noted earlier, was far from closed. Trade and industry were well represented on it.⁹⁶ But, even in the county’s textile districts, there remained ⁹¹ GRO, D149/B8, Petition of the Poor Weavers, 22 August 1755; A State of the Case and Narrative of Facts relating to the late Commotions and Rising of the Weavers in the County Of Gloucester (1757), 23–4; 29 Geo. II, c.33. ⁹² GRO, Q/SR 1756, Memorial of the clothiers to the Michaelmas Quarter Sessions; Gloucester Journal, 12 October, 1756. ⁹³ See p. 40. ⁹⁴ A State of the Case, 24–7; Gloucester Journal, 12 October 1756; R. Wright, The Life of Major General James Wolfe (London, 1864), 349–51. ⁹⁵ A State of the Case, 29–32; Gloucester Journal, 23 November 1756; Commons Journal, xxvii. 683, 730–3, 753–4, 785–6. ⁹⁶ See p. 33.
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sufficient landed justices to ensure that the clothiers were not allowed carte blanche to oppress their workforce, for landed ratepayers feared the consequences of prolonged industrial warfare. Here a pattern of textile workers appealing to the bench for support in times of conflict became established. In neighbouring Wiltshire, the defeat of the paternalists after 1738 meant that only industrial muscle and violent protest provided hope of protection. As in all other forms of popular protest, the development of industrial protest depended not just upon an evolving capitalist economic structure but also upon the agency of local justices and shapers of local opinion. The campaign also demonstrates the desire, shared by most if not all workers, to find a sturdy mechanism to safeguard customary work practices and incomes, preferably one that involved the local authorities as arbitrators and as enforcers. This desire reflected a recognition that, in a changing economy, even within the best organized trades, labour power was unlikely to provide a permanent protection against capitalist profit maximization. Such a wish did not represent an ‘anti-market’ mentality. Workers in eighteenth-century industry were all too aware of the market. Indeed, their whole lives were lived within market economies: as consumers in an increasingly volatile food market; and as producers in a labour market that they well knew fluctuated both in demand for and in the supply of labour. What they sought was the security that came from the underpinning, if only on an annual basis, of the value of the labour they performed. It was a point made elegantly by the Spitalfields weavers in late 1768 in an abortive agreement on piece rates. To an agreed ‘Book of Prices’, they added not only a statement of goodwill but also a poem: And may no treacherous, base, designing men, E’er make encroachments on our rights again; May upright masters still augment their treasure, And journeymen pursue their work with pleasure, May arts and manufactories still increase, And Spitalfields be blest with prosperous peace.⁹⁷
Significantly, the Spitalfields Act of 1773 brought their industry peace, if not prosperity. Other trades had to continue to battle ‘encroachments’ on their ‘rights’. ⁹⁷ Plummer, The London Weavers’ Company, 326–7.
7 Country People: Popular Protest in the English Countryside Studies of popular protest in the eighteenth century tend to ignore the rural population. These ‘country people’, as they were often referred to, are seldom seen as instigators of large-scale disturbances. While the culture of rural England could be robust and even brutal,¹ it is not usually associated with the sorts of orchestrated community responses that characterized the way in which urban and sub-urban manufacturing and mining populations faced up to challenges to customary expectations or to living standards. Agricultural labourers, it is assumed, were too preoccupied with finding and keeping work to risk overt protest, while farmers were too dependent upon maintaining their reputation with the landlords from whom they rented land to endanger that relationship. There is merit in such a view. Popular protest was harder to initiate and sustain in a more purely rural society. Urban and ‘sub-urban’ industrial workers inhabited a world in which a degree of anonymity might be retained, a vital element if protestors were to have a chance of escaping retribution. ‘Country people’, on the other hand, lived in far smaller face-to-face communities in which they could be subject to much tighter social controls. Craft workers in the country depended upon fewer employers or customers for work and, like labourers, could easily find themselves blacklisted and deprived of work. Wages in the countryside were lower and were not always paid solely in cash: many labourers’ remuneration consisted of ‘a money wage with a wide variety of perquisites’, which increased dependence upon employers.² Combinations were hard to sustain. Friendly societies certainly existed, as Sir F. M. Eden’s investigations in the 1790s showed,³ but they were less numerous than in the towns and seem, for basic actuarial reasons, to have enjoyed a more precarious existence. Furthermore, rural workers’ homes were often less secure. Urban workers and workers in the manufacturing districts rarely rented their cottages from their direct employers, since the latter saw little reason to tie up capital in housing. In the countryside the power of the larger landlords and ¹ For rural popular culture, see the excellent study by R. W. Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, 1700–1880 (Junction Books, 1982). ² G. E. Mingay (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vi. 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), 1069–70. ³ Sir F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor (1797).
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farmers over housing was much more apparent.⁴ The established church was much stronger a force for social control in the countryside than in the towns or manufacturing districts, as Non-Conformists well knew. Only where the substantial farmers espoused the cause of Dissent might this power be weakened, as in the case of the Wiltshire village of Bratton where the Reeves and Whitaker families sustained a flourishing Baptist congregation.⁵ And, finally, the Poor Law was often employed as a far more coercive instrument in the country than in the town. Whereas most urban overseers gave priority to the economic needs of employers and ensured that able-bodied non-settled indigent poor, whose labour might well be needed in the future, were granted relief, in the countryside, where the needs of agriculture were more predictable, ratepayers’ interests lay in keeping rates low. Even when protests did occur, they often proved to have ‘external’ authors. For example, in 1761 a dispute broke out at Kings Langley between the farmers and their reapers over harvest wages. The reapers ‘assembled, to the number of 200, armed with pistols, swords, guns, and clubs, and threatened to fire the town’ should their wage demand be rejected. Troops were sent to the district and ‘a great skirmish happened . . . in which several were wounded. Six were taken and committed to St Albans jail, and the rest dispersed. Some of these after made a riot in the Isle of Ely.’⁶ Significantly, those involved were migrant Irish labourers. Their very impermanence within the workforce enabled them to exploit to the full the bargaining power that all labour potentially enjoyed at harvest time, safe in the knowledge that they might easily move on. Their willingness to protest serves to highlight the apparent lack of militancy of harvesters whose homes were in the English countryside. However, we must not overemphasize the quiescence of the country people. Take, for example, the case of food riots. Historians, properly regarding industrial workers and miners as the main instigators of food riots, tend to assume that country people took no part in such protests.⁷ Their absence is ascribed to their intrinsic lack of community solidarity and to their access to alternative supplies of food from their ownership of small plots of land, from the use of the commons, or from benevolent employers. Stevenson, for example, argues that, in subsistence crises, farmers supplied their labourers’ needs, either by giving them food at reduced prices or by turning a blind eye to pilfering. Such arguments rest mainly on supposition: farmers were not normally so amenable towards thefts of their crops, though there were claims in 1795 that farmers were withholding food from market to sustain their workforces.⁸ ⁴ Cottage landlords, perhaps the largest supplier of rented homes, were generally dependent upon the power of the greater owners, since as tenant farmers, petty producers, or traders, they in turn depended upon the wealthier classes for custom. ⁵ M. Reeves, Sheep Bell and Ploughshare: The Story of Two Families (Moonraker, 1978). ⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxi (1761), 377. ⁷ J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (Longman, 1979, 1992 edn.), 124: ‘one of the most striking features was the relatively small part played by agricultural labourers.’ ⁸ For example, see J. Stevenson, ‘Bread or Blood’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.), The Unquiet Countryside (Rooutledge, 1989), 33–4.
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It is certainly true that the large bands of ‘regulators’ who spread the major outbreaks of food rioting were predominantly industrial workers. However, country people were frequently to be found at the margins and even leading smaller local events. If we look at the food riots of 1756–7 in the West Country, for example, we find that on 5 December 1756 a body of Dean miners were ‘joined by the country people’ in an attack on a barge on the Severn near Gloucester. They had offloaded over 600 bushels before soldiers arrived to drive them off.⁹ When in January the riots spread to Wiltshire, a large load of flour, en route from Marlborough to Swindon, far from the industrial districts, ‘was stopt by the poor of Ogburn St Andrew’s and notwithstanding the presence of two justices, the owner (who is known to be a large dealer) was obliged to have it brought back’. Another load of flour, this time going to Calne, was seized at Fyfield, far from any manufacturing centre, ‘by the mob’ and all 80 bushels divided up amongst them and carried off.¹⁰ In April, at Lavington, a small agrarian village, ‘a female mob stopt a waggon load of wheat . . . going to Melksham, and after sharing it between them departed to their several homes unmolested.’¹¹ Riots in Dorset and in Hampshire also featured country people, as did later ones in Hereford.¹² The countryside was no haven of social harmony. Social and economic tensions were often high, perhaps even higher than in the towns and manufacturing districts where there were more potential outlets for disaffection. Tensions were often manifested in what James Scott terms ‘the everyday forms of peasant resistance . . . foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage and so forth.’¹³ They also, as in the nineteenth century, took the form of animal maiming, attacks upon fruit trees, or the destruction of minor pieces of property.¹⁴ Such forms of covert protest are hard to quantify and assess in terms of their overall social significance. At one level they reflected individual grievances, individually revenged. But they also alert us to the potential for wider discord, when threats to economies impacted upon a larger cross section of rural society. Three examples demonstrate this: threats to common rights; threats to local markets; and threats to the economy of agrarian petty production.
⁹ Bath Journal, 20 December 1756; WO 4/52, Mayor of Bristol to the War Office. ¹⁰ Bath Journal, 24 January 1757. This mob may well have had an ‘industrial’ core but it is clear that it was bolstered by ‘country people’. ¹¹ Bath Journal, 30 May, 6, 27 June 1757. ¹² Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 9 May 1757; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 7 May 1757. ¹³ James C. Scott, The Weapons of the Weak: Every Day Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale, 1985), p. xvi. ¹⁴ See J. Archer, ‘By a Flash and a Scare’: Arson, Animal Maiming and Poaching in East Anglia 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1990). The destruction of trees and growing crops has been recently researched by Carl Griffin.
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‘ALL RABBITS ARE VERMIN’ In November 1750 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported: Great disturbances have happened in Leicestershire and adjoining parts by a humour that prevails among the populace of destroying rabbits so that in several places they have ruined warrens that produced 100L per annum profit: but on attempting the same on the estate of a person of distinction, an order was procured for the march of some soldiers from Loughborough which dispersed the rabble and apprehended the ringleaders of whom 28 are imprisoned.¹⁵
These events, which took place in Charnwood Forest, followed a series of similar attacks on warrens which had been going on for some eighteen months. In the summer of 1748 large crowds had assembled, paraded, and, shouting ‘all rabbits are vermin’, had started to dig up recently extended rabbit warrens in this area of free chase. In one encounter, some 2,000 protesters were confronted by dragoons. They were dispersed without bloodshed. However, the diggers and their supporters were not to be intimated and attacks continued. It was reported in 1749, ‘They rained triumphant and unmolested all last year.’ The assault on the warrens proved to be self-financing since, as the diggers ‘publickly sell the flesh of the rabbits in the neighbouring towns, the profit allures them to continue and extend themselves’. The battle, however, was not in essence one of man versus rabbit: it was about common rights, in particular the rights of the commoners of Charnwood to graze stock on the lands where the warrens had been created. Their war on the warrens was to continue until 1751 when the rights of commoners living in the twenty-six townships and villages neighbouring the forest were eventually upheld in the courts.¹⁶ Until relatively recently, it has been an orthodoxy that common rights had little value to the cottager, small farmer, and labourer.¹⁷ The outstanding reconstruction of the economy of cottage rights to the common by Jeanette Neeson has done much to correct this view. As she has shown, a very wide cross section of rural society was able to utilize the commons as a means of partial self-sufficiency.¹⁸ Certainly such rights were increasingly under threat everywhere in the eighteenth century from ‘improving’ landlords, enclosure, and the pressures of a rapidly growing rural population. The battle to retain them was generally more a guerrilla campaign than an open battle, since numbers in any one parish were usually ¹⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, xx (1750), 522. ¹⁶ D. Hay, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Allen Lane, 1975), 227 n. 4. See also E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991) 105–6. ¹⁷ J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (Batsford, 1966), 97. ¹⁸ J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 6.
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relatively small and the power relationship between those forcing change and those resisting it was heavily distorted. However, before parliamentary enclosure brought such conflicts into stark relief, there were occasions when wider communities were drawn into such conflicts, sometimes with spectacular and unexpected results. The case of Charnwood was not the first major conflict over warrens in Hanoverian England. In 1714 ‘huge groups of labourers’ had attacked newly created rabbit warrens in Sussex to protect their common rights.¹⁹ Nor was it the last. Let us examine the attempts by the lord of the manor of Cannock Chase to develop rabbit warrens in Staffordshire.²⁰ Cannock Chase was an ancient deer-hunting tract of waste covering some thirty square miles, though it was being increasingly eroded at its edges by encroaching farmland and the emparkments created by wealthy landlords such as the Ansons.²¹ The lords of the manor, the wealthy Paget family, the Earls of Uxbridge, had long fought to preserve its abundant game for their own exclusive sport. The Chase was also, however, ancient common land and the farmers in the surrounding villages claimed unrestricted rights of common, dating from an agreement reached in 1605, which granted copyholders in the adjoining parishes of Rugeley, Haywood, Longdon, and Cannock unfettered access.²² To these men, the Chase was a valuable source of grazing and a key part of their economy.²³ In the late 1740s the rumbling conflicts between the Pagets and the commoners came to a head. A new Earl inherited the estate and immediately set about asserting his authority. He increased the numbers of keepers and commenced a vigorous prosecution of all who hunted on or across his lands. This attempt to preserve the deer angered not only farmers, whose crops they ate, but also many local gentry whose traditional claims to hunt on the Chase were contemptuously rejected by Uxbridge. However, it was his decision to enlarge his manorial control over the Chase that sparked protest. Uxbridge was determined to extend the size and number of managed rabbit warrens on the Chase. These warrens had long been a source of conflict. To Uxbridge they represented a good investment on land that, to him, was otherwise unproductive.²⁴ To the commoners, however, the rabbits were vermin that ate the grass which should feed their sheep and other stock. By 1750 the warrens occupied some 3,500 acres and contained around 15,000 rabbits. Their voracious appetite in a short time halved the number of sheep which could be grazed. Moreover, the rabbits also displaced the deer onto the farmers’ crops in the fields around. Attempts to negotiate with Uxbridge were met ¹⁹ J. M. Beattie, ‘The Pattern of Crime in England 1660–1800’, Past and Present, lxii (1974), 64. ²⁰ These disturbances are examined in Douglas Hay’s innovative study of poaching on Cannock Chase: Hay, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws’, particularly 220–36. ²¹ See below, pp. 192–3 for Anson. ²² Hay, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws’, 221. ²³ The Chase’s game was also a source of food and income to the communities of small owneroccupiers, miners, nailers, metal workers, rural craftsmen, and labourers scattered around it. Hay notes how one man killed nearly eighty hares in one winter alone, 1764, which he sold to dealers in nearby Lichfield at 3s. each, a tidy income. Ibid. 203. ²⁴ Each rabbit was worth 7d. for meat and their coats could net £30 for a thousand skins.
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with indifference, the Earl’s agents arguing that he had the right, should he so choose, to turn the whole of the Chase into warren. Indeed, he was said to be considering having sheep declared ‘not commonable’, thus making their presence on the Chase illegal and wrecking a key underpinning to the commoners’ economy. In 1751 leading figures in the surrounding villages took legal advice on how best to assert their rights of common. When Uxbridge learned of this, he strove by intimidation to break up the coalition ranged against him. When it was reported that leading figures in the small town of Rugeley, including the vicar, Revd Averne, and a leading farmer, Richard Brindley, ‘designed to raise a Riott and destroy all the warrens upon Cannock Chase’, Uxbridge’s steward sent a man to warn them off: ‘if they thought their common right injured, and would themselves come upon the warrens or any of them kill a couple or two of rabbits, Lord Uxbridge would waive all privilege, bring his action against them and justly try the point with them.’ Brindley replied, ‘that they had had a great deal of ill-usage from my lord and if their neighbours went to dig the rabbits out, they would join them.’ An uneasy peace ensued. However, in the spring of 1752 the Earl’s opponents held new meetings and ‘declarations were made in Rudgley that a subscription was setting on foot to destroy the rabbits’. In June a farmer from the neighbouring village of Longdon brought a case against Uxbridge and all his warrens for trespass and for ‘depasturing conies upon the Chase to the damage of the petitioner’s right of common’. Uxbridge refused to negotiate. He did, however, make sure that the case was constantly traversed and delayed, all the time deliberately increasing the villagers’ costs. Angered and with their stock finding decreasing pasturage, on 22 December 1752 farmers and labourers set about digging up and killing the rabbits in one of the warrens, declaring that ‘they came in their own right to destroy the warrens’. By Christmas Day those taking part had grown to formidable dimensions, making counterattack by the keepers impossible. The arrest of the ‘ringleaders’ brought the destruction to a temporary halt. The local justices secured an agreement from the rioters that ‘all future trespasses upon the warren should cease and the right be fairly tried’.²⁵ ‘I really think we have put a stop to all riotous proceedings’, Uxbridge’s agent Nicolls reported, ‘and shall be glad if your lawyers join with me in opinion, that the freeholders etc have given you a considerable advantage by their attempt to for they dig up rabbits in a very old part of an old warren.’²⁶ However, Uxbridge’s case against the men was counter-challenged by a suit alleging assault. This case, funded by a wealthy Rugeley farmer and mine supervisor, demonstrated the widespread animosity towards the Earl. Eventually the commoners’ case came to court, but it was lost when they were unable to produce documentary evidence to support their claims to manorial customary rights. Frustrated beyond measure, the commoners determined to ²⁵ SRO, D 603/K/5/7, Particular transactions relating to the rabbit warrens upon Cannock Chase. ²⁶ Ibid., Correspondence, William Nicolls to Uxbridge, 27 December 1752.
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destroy the warrens once and for all. There was nothing covert about their actions. Led by leading farmers, they openly advertised for diggers, offering them food, drink, and 1s. 6d. a day to join ‘the Free Company on Cannock Wood’. Miners and labourers, who made use of the commons to graze stock, joined this band. Nicolls, the Earl’s agent, got wind of it: ‘I plainly perceive the intent is to raise a mobb these ensuing holidays,’ he wrote on 24 December. He ordered as many of the Earl’s servants as he could find to ‘to patrol the chase tomorrow in separate parties and whoever they meet with . . . to take from them their spades and utensils and should they meet with any resistance they are then to beat them well as doing in their own defence’.²⁷ However, his men were to find themselves greatly outnumbered when eventually on 28 December 1753 the attack was launched.²⁸ Some 200 men, carrying their spades like muskets, marched to Beaudesert Hall, Uxbridge’s grand house in the middle of the Chase, and gave three cheers. A trumpeter blew a horn, a hat, betokening the crowd’s colours, was hoisted on a stick and they set off for the warrens. The crowd, in good order and with the leading ‘freeholders or copyholders at their head, entered upon the warrens . . . destroyed every warren upon the whole Chase (except one in the possession of Samuel Bailey)’, where it was agreed that Uxbridge did have a customary right of warren.²⁹ For the following fortnight some 200–300 men worked steadily, killing all the rabbits.³⁰ The strength of numbers overawed the keepers who kept their distance. Uxbridge, furious, demanded military support from Stafford. However, when the dragoons were dispatched, the local justices first held a meeting with the leading Rugeley protestors with the military in attendance and then sent the troops back to Stafford: ‘the riot and destruction of the warrens went on with more fury than before.’³¹ It eloquently indicated the opinions of the magistrates on the matter. Uxbridge turned to the courts, obtaining a judgment at the Staffordshire assizes that granted him, and his warrens, prior claim to the Chase. Nicolls gleefully reported, ‘we (to the great surprise of everybody) proved an indisputable right of free chase and free warren as well as a judgment thereof . . . The defendants were not able to offer any sort of defence.’ Better, he noted, ‘the present defendants must inevitably make such submissions as [you] will be pleased to accept to prevent the total ruin of themselves and familys.’³² Victorious, the Earl set about a wholesale eviction of any tenant who had taken part in the attack on the warrens or who had aided the diggers. They were forced out even before they could get ²⁷ SRO, D 603/K/5/7, Nicolls to Uxbridge, 24 December 1753. ²⁸ Hay notes, ‘It was conducted with spirit and the ceremony proper to a reclaiming of lost rights.’ Hay, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws’, 229. ²⁹ SRO, D 603/K/5/7, Particular transactions relating to the rabbit warrens upon Cannock Chase. ³⁰ Hay notes that sixty men came from Walsall, the rest coming from the nearby towns and villages. Hay, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws’, 228. ³¹ SRO, D 603/K/5/7, Particular transactions relating to the rabbit warrens upon Cannock Chase. ³² SRO, D 603/K/5/7, Correspondence, Nicolls to Uxbridge, 2 April 1754.
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their crops in. Many of their cottages were then pulled down.³³ He also entered private actions against his leading independent opponents. When the court found in his favour but awarded him only derisory compensation of 1s., he pursued them for his costs. A case before the King’s Bench eventually established his unconditional rights to the Chase. Lord Dennison opined that a commoner could not ‘destroy the estate of the lord, in order to preserve his own small right of common’.³⁴ The rabbits returned and they continued to be poached, along with the other game on the Chase. But the strong spirit of community, which his assault on the commoners’ rights had engendered, was shattered. There were to be no more mass actions.
‘BLOOD FOR BLOOD AND DOWN WITH THE TURNPIKE’ Turnpiking of roads marked a major step towards the establishment of a national market since they led to much needed improvements to the highways. However, they also involved the effective privatization of the roads. From Tudor times the responsibility for their upkeep had rested with the parish. While an Act of 1691 instructed justices to hold an annual sessions to appoint parish surveyors of the highways and ensure they carried out necessary repairs, and another Act in 1697 empowered the bench to enlarge the highway and compensate owners as necessary, the work still had to be carried out by the parishes. Since they had to fund repair and improvement, there was every incentive for ratepayers to scrimp on road maintenance. Generally they used parish paupers to do the work. It was rarely done well. Economic expansion in the eighteenth century further worsened the condition of the roads and led to constant complaints from travellers. Arthur Young recorded of his journey along the Grinsthorpe to Coltsworth road: ‘we were at every moment either buried in quagmires of mud, or racked to dislocation over pieces of rock which they term mending.’³⁵ But, while all complained, most parishes, blaming the problem on through travellers who did not contribute to the road’s upkeep, continued to begrudge any increased outlay. Therefore Parliament mainly confined itself to restricting such traffic as was deemed to harm the road surface. For example, in 1741 it banned loads of over 3 tons and in 1753 it limited the number of horses that might be used to pull carts, stipulating that all carriages must have wheel rims of nine or more inches in width in an attempt to prevent them cutting up the surface. Such legislation had little impact. ³³ Ibid., Nicolls to Uxbridge, 15 July 1754. He noted, ‘some of the present tenants have not yet got their crops I wish for an early answer that their punishment may be better proportioned to their crime.’ ³⁴ Hay, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws’, 234. ³⁵ A. Young, A Six Month’s Tour through the North of England (1771), ii. 83. The fact that this road had been recently turnpiked alerts us the fact that it took time to improve road quality.
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The concept of turnpikes, by which the management of a public road between fixed points was handed over to a trust for a fixed period, during which time, in exchange for laying down an improved surface, they would be allowed to charge tolls for use, was not new in the eighteenth century. In 1663 the Great North Road in the counties of Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Cambridgeshire was entrusted to the justices who substantially improved it using toll income. However, it was not until 1706 that Parliament allowed the more general establishment of trusts run by independent men. Initially development was slow but the 1750s saw a minor boom in turnpike trusts and by 1770 over 500 had been formed, managing some 15,000 miles of road. By the end of century there were over 1,600 turnpike trusts in existence.³⁶ Travel time was dramatically cut. For example, in 1754 it took four days to get from Manchester to London by coach; in 1760, thanks to turnpikes, the same coach journey took three days and by 1784 it took only two. Stagecoaches proliferated and the number of travellers increased in proportion.³⁷ Moreover, the volume of trade on the roads, not only local traffic but regional and national trade, grew apace. Wealthy travellers were generally prepared to pay the increased costs that the turnpikes imposed on their travel if their journeys were quicker as a result. Merchants moving large commodities gained the advantage of a faster turnaround of their capital, while improving landlords saw real benefits from extending the market for locally grown produce, especially wheat. Turnpikes proved a major stimulus to enclosure after 1760. However, by no means everyone saw the turnpikes, with their distinctive tollhouses and tollgates, as a good thing. For small local traders, higglers, and small farmers, the turnpikes threatened to make something which had always been free—their passage to local markets—suddenly expensive. They had, they believed, already contributed to the highway’s upkeep as ratepayers. Moreover, collective wisdom told them that the right of free passage along the highway was supported by common law. Trusts were therefore seen to be seeking to abrogate, for their exclusive benefit, property rights that properly belonged to the community. This dislike was exacerbated by the fact that the trusts usually sought to levy charges before any improvements had been made. This was necessarily so, given that the only other way to raise revenue was for the trustees to advance it, but it added to the deep resentments turnpikes aroused. Furthermore, granting an Act to turnpike a road was an overtly political process that exacerbated suspicions of corruption. Turnpikes led to extensive disturbances in three regions in the eighteenth century: around Bristol; in the area between Gloucester and Ledbury; and in the ³⁶ P. S. Bagwell, The Transport Revolution (Routledge, 1988) 29; P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford 1991), 163. ³⁷ Bagwell, Transport Revolution, 31, argues that, comparing travel between ten leading urban centers, the increase was eightfold in the years between 1790 and 1836.
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West Riding of Yorkshire.³⁸ In each, ‘country people’ proved remarkably prominent. The earliest extensive protests against turnpikes greeted the attempt by the city council of Bristol in 1727 to take over not one but all the main roads running east from Bristol through Kingswood Forest. The forest was home to one of the most assertive populations in the West, the Kingswood colliers, who, as petty producers, supplied the city and the surrounding region with much of its small coal. Wesley, who was shocked by their lawlessness, stated that they were ‘a people famous from the beginning hitherto for neither fearing God nor regarding man’.³⁹ They had no intention of submitting to the turnpikes. They immediately ‘Assembled in tumultuous manner, and . . . Burnt pull’d down and destroyed all the said Turnpikes and obstinately persist, if any more are erected, they will serve them in the same manner.’⁴⁰ When the trust re-erected the gates, the colliers were as good as their word and swore that ‘they’ll bring no Coal into the City, nor suffer any Turnpikes in their Roads till they are exempted from paying Toll’. As earnest of their intention, they even marched, ‘with Clubs and Staves in a noisy manner’ in a show of strength, right through the centre of Bristol and ventured as far afield as Corsham in Wiltshire in their campaign of destruction against toll gates. All supplies of coal were stopped from leaving the pits. Troops were rushed into the Bristol region and stood guard on the surviving gates.⁴¹ Miners were taken up, though the cases against them all failed. However, the tolls could still not be exacted.⁴² In a lengthy letter sent to ‘Mr Turnpike’, the colliers made clear the reasons for their resentments. It was not just the tolls, which they saw as a deliberate attack on their economy, to which they objected. They challenged the right of the trust, set out in the act, to take furze from the Kingswood commons for road repair without payment, seeing this as a theft of a collective resource by ‘outsiders’. They also blamed the local landowners who, from parsimony, had failed to keep the old roads in due repair. Since many now sat on the trust, it appeared to the miners that these men were seeking to transfer their financial responsibilities onto the wider community’s pockets. They described the turnpike act as ‘a thing Clandestinely purchas’d’ and its promoters as tainted with ‘stock-jobbing’. In the ³⁸ The riots in the west of England are covered in R. Malcolmson, ‘ “A Set of Ungovernable People”: The Kingswood Colliers in the Eighteenth Century’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hutchinson, 1980), 85–127; W. Albert, ‘Popular Opposition to Turnpike Trusts in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd series, v(1) (1979), 1–17; M. Freeman, ‘Popular Attitudes to Turnpikes in Early-Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Historical Geography, xix(1) (1993), 33–47; and A. Charlesworth, et al., ‘The Jack-a-Lent Riots and Opposition to Turnpikes in the Bristal Region in 1749’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996), 46–68. The Yorkshire riots await in-depth analysis, there being only a short account in Albert. ³⁹ N. Radcliff (ed.), The Journal of John Wesley (1940), 107. ⁴⁰ SP 36/1, Day to Newcastle, 28 June 1727. ⁴¹ Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 1 July 1727; House of Commons Journal, xxi. 157–9. ⁴² Malcolmson, ‘ “A Set of Ungovernable People” ’, 98–9.
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aftermath of the South Sea Bubble, this association of the turnpike trust with Whig financial corruption could not have been clearer.⁴³ Others felt the same way. In September new anti-turnpike riots broke out on the roads running north out of Gloucester, this time principally involving ‘country people’ and in April 1728 two men were sentenced to death for destroying turnpikes on the Stroud–Dursley road in that county.⁴⁴ The colliers’ actions prompted the passage of a new Bristol Turnpike Act, which made one concession to the miners by allowing free passage to animals carrying coals, though coal carts remained chargeable. However, Parliament also passed new legislation that made a second conviction for destroying turnpike gates punishable by transportation for seven years. Neither persuaded the miners to discontinue their activities. When in 1731, the Bristol Trust added new roads to its control and sought again to levy tolls, their gates were once more attacked. Coincidentally, roads to the east of Kingswood were also being turnpiked. Rioting ensued. A local justice noted, ‘These people are destroying the turnpikes and burning Turnpike Houses all round the County.’ He had arrested four men but then found his house surrounded by an angry crowd and prudently decided to release them.⁴⁵ The following year miners were venturing as far as Chippenham, some seventeen miles distant, to destroy gates. Two miners were subsequently tried and sentenced to transportation for their parts in this riot. The Kingswood colliers petitioned the King, seeking a pardon for the men, promising no further attacks on the gates. There were no further riots, but it is clear that intimidation remained strong and in 1735, when new disorders took place, the Trust threatened to wash their hands of the business ‘if the Government will not support them and if the Laws are to be broke through by such a set of villins’.⁴⁶ The issue of turnpikes in the Bristol region was reignited in 1749 when the Trust petitioned for a new Act, since the previous Acts, granted for twenty-one years, were about to expire.⁴⁷ This time, however, there were new protagonists, for the Trust now sought to extend its control to the south and west of the city. At Bedminster ‘a great body of the country people of Somerset’ attacked a new gate and gates and tollhouses were destroyed on the Long Ashton and Toghill roads. Attempts to overawe the rioters by hiring ‘some stout men’ to protect the tollkeepers and by commissioners themselves guarding the gates were treated with contempt. Somerset farmers, bringing cattle and colts to Bristol fair, forced their way through and on their return exchanged blows with the guards. Three men were arrested. The following night, the ‘country people . . . in a prodigious body, with drums beating, and loud shouting, armed with cutting instruments fixed in long
⁴³ GRO, D15/2, ‘The Colliers Letter to the Turnpike’, 3 July 1727. ⁴⁴ Gloucester Journal, 5 September 1727; 16 April 1728. ⁴⁵ SP 36/23, Blaythwaite to Newcastle, 5 July 1731; SP 36/25, Codrington to Newcastle, 14 July 1731. ⁴⁶ Malcolmson, ‘ “A Set of Ungovernable People” ’, 99. ⁴⁷ Bath Journal, 3 July 1749.
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staffs’, returned to the same gates and destroyed them, along with the tollhouse.⁴⁸ When ‘A body of gentlemen’ from Bristol rode into Somerset to arrest a man for his part in this attack,⁴⁹ their action stimulated further disorder. A crowd said to number some three or four hundred farmers and labourers marched to the re-erected Ashton gates, tore them down, and burned them before setting off to treat neighbouring gates in the same fashion. The various bands of rioters then converged at Bedminster. They arrived well armed, carrying ‘rusty swords, pitchforks, broad axes, guns, pistols, clubs’, and following three drummers. They were led by ‘two chiefs on horseback; one with his face black’d, and the other a young Gentleman Farmer of Nailsey, well known, carried the Standard, being a Silk Handkerchief on a long staff ’. Their purpose was soon clear: to exact revenge on the constable who had arrested the three men earlier. They demolished his house and then marched towards the city and destroyed the gates and turnpike house at Totterdown. Here they were in turn attacked by a large party of commissioners, constables, and seamen recruited for the purpose. The Riot Act was read and some thirty men seized and put in custody.⁵⁰ This setback did not deter the ‘country people’ who continued to destroy gates, but they now also sought the support of the Kingswood colliers, according to some accounts through promises of money.⁵¹ Soon it was reported that ‘almost all the turnpikes, with their houses, round the city, are now laid waste, burnt and entirely demolished.’ While by no means all miners joined in, many did resume their earlier activities. Large groups of miners levied tolls on all who passed through Kingswood and threatened to march on Bristol to release the imprisoned men. Miners around Paulton, to the south-east of Bristol, were also drawn into the disturbances.⁵² Encountering the circuit judge as he made his way to the city, they informed him, ‘Sir, we have cut down the turnpikes’ before demanding money from him. Bristol was placed on a siege footing and troops rushed to protect the town.⁵³ Those arrested were tried at Taunton and Salisbury. At Taunton, where it was feared local sentiment would secure acquittals, seven men were reprieved and two men found guilty and hanged.⁵⁴ The larger group of eighteen prisoners were sent in 1750 to the Wiltshire assizes, using a clause in the 1735 Act that allowed such traverses, in the hope that here the jury would exact harsher sentence. In fact the jury acquitted the first case, even though ‘very full and clear evidence’ of guilt was advanced. A new jury was empanelled to hear the next case, which they in turn acquitted. The remaining cases had to be adjourned.⁵⁵ When armed bailiffs tried to arrest Kingswood miners who had attacked the gates, they were beaten off and ⁴⁸ ⁵⁰ ⁵¹ ⁵² ⁵³ ⁵⁴
Western Flying Post, 7 August 1749. ⁴⁹ Gentleman’s Magazine, xix (1749), 376. Western Flying Post, 14 August 1749. J. Latimer, The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (Bristol, 1893) 275. Western Flying Post, 14 August 1749. Ibid., 21 August 1749; Latimer, Annals, 275. Bath Journal, 9 April 1750. ⁵⁵ Gloucester Journal, 24 April 1750.
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armed patrols of miners initiated to foil any further attempts.⁵⁶ In Somerset anger at the turnpikes remained deep, with farmers threatening to stop all food reaching the city and to attack gates and the city itself.⁵⁷ The second region to experience sustained attacks on turnpikes was the area between Gloucester and Hereford where in early 1730 several trusts took over the main highways. In 1731 a mob destroyed gates near Ross while in 1732 gates between the two towns were attacked.⁵⁸ Here, too, legislation making any attack on turnpikes punishable by transportation failed to deter protest. In late 1734 and early 1735 a new wave of assaults began. While troops were deployed in numbers, they failed to secure peace. In fact, the protestors got bolder: ‘the Rioters are become more numerous and have been in in great Body armed and disguised marching through the Streets of Gloucester, insulting everybody’ and shouting ‘Blood for Blood and down with the Turnpike’. They announced that ‘there never should for the future be any toll paid they being determined to oppose by Force all such.’⁵⁹ At Ledbury hundreds invaded the town and destroyed all the gates and tollhouses. Two days later they returned and took collections from all who passed by in tribute for their efforts. And at Stonehouse in the textile districts a small group smashed the gates.⁶⁰ The government was sufficiently concerned by these events to issue a Royal Proclamation restating the laws and offering £50 reward for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators.⁶¹ It made no difference. When in September the Ledbury trust began to re-establish gates, riots again ensued. When a justice arrested two men in one disturbance, he found his house besieged by around 200 ‘country people’ who demanded their release. A pitched battle ensued in which one man was killed. Further troubles followed. The captured men were not tried locally since it was felt that the local gentry could not be trusted to find them guilty. Four were tried at Worcester where two were hanged and two, charged under the Black Act for being in disguise during the attack, were tried at the King’s Bench. Thomas Reynolds, a labourer, was sentenced to death and hanged at Tyburn. However, the rope did not kill him. As his apparently lifeless body was being screwed into his coffin, ‘he thrust back the lid’. Although the executioner tried to stuff him back in the box, the crowd seized him and carried him into a neighbouring house where, after vomiting blood, he eventually died. It was a hard ending so far from home.⁶² Their deaths did not put an end to disturbances since the next year a gate was attacked by a crowd numbering around sixty people. But the trustees seem to have mitigated the toll charges for local people and this eased the acceptance of the turnpikes. ⁵⁶ Western Flying Post, 25 September, 2 October 1749. ⁵⁷ Ibid., 11 September 1749. ⁵⁸ GRO, Q/SD, 1731, 13–14, Depositions. ⁵⁹ SP 36/32, Selwyn to Newcastle, 28 May; Memorial from the City of Gloucester, 25 May 1734. ⁶⁰ Albert, ‘Popular Opposition’, 5. ⁶¹ SP 36/32, Royal Proclamation, 18 July 1734. ⁶² Gentleman’s Magazine, vi (1736), 422; TS 11/1122/X/104426, ‘A Narrative of the Riot That Happened at Ledbury in the County of Hereford on the 20th Day of Sept. 1735 When the Turnpikes Were Cut Down’; 1122/5824, ‘Copy of Several Informations of Persons Concerned in the Riot at Ledbury’. A short account of the trial at the Herefordshire assizes of those arrested after firing guns at the magistrate’s house can be found in W. Stubbs and G. Talmash, The Crown Circuit Companion (London, 1749), ii. 388–9.
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The third area where turnpikes led to sustained resistance was in the West Riding of Yorkshire between Leeds and Bradford in 1753. The two previous years had seen a proliferation of trusts set up in the textile region where there had long been criticisms of the ways in which the poor quality of the roads was hampering economic development. A gate on the Leeds–Selby road was destroyed in 1752 after ‘the bellman made proclamation for the inhabitants to bring their hatchets and axes at 12 o’clock that night, to cut down the turnpike’,⁶³ but in the following year violence on a wide scale erupted. At Apperley Bridge and Bradford Moor gates were destroyed and gates on the Leeds road outside Bradford smashed. Four days later crowds destroyed most of the gates around Bradford and the next day gates at Halton Dyal and Kirkstall on the road to Leeds suffered the same fate. The area to the south of Bradford saw new attacks on gates and tollhouses at Cleckheaton and Brighouse, while a major battle ensued at Harewood Bridge where Edwin Lascelles, a prominent landlord and politician, and his tenants fought off a crowd of ‘about 300, armed with swords and clubs’. When they ‘gallantly thrashed them and took 10 prisoners’, tempers grew even shorter. The Recorder of Leeds and ‘all the active part of the magistrates’ were threatened ‘with pulling down of their houses, and even taking away their lives’. South of Leeds, rioters attacked gates at Beeston after a carter who had refused to pay ‘was seized by soldiers’ but freed by an angry crowd. This inspired the protestors to proclaim that they would release three others captured the previous day and in the evening a crowd of ‘about 800 men assembled in Briggate’ in Leeds before the King’s Arms where the trustees were in session. The Riot Act was read but the crowd persisted in throwing stones at the inn and at soldiers guarding it and would not disperse. The justices ordered the troops to open fire. Eight men were allegedly killed instantly and some eighty wounded. The mayor was forced to admit that the authorities were unable to restore order. When the gates at Beeston were re-erected, they were promptly torn down again, and throughout the following two months gates were burned or smashed whenever they were erected.⁶⁴ As in the West of England, local juries refused to convict, to the frustration of trustees and the government. The protracted disturbances in these three regions raise the question of why there were not more examples of such large-scale resistance. This is hard to answer satisfactorily, though the fact that the outbreaks in the West predated the great growth of turnpike trusts after 1750 may have forewarned later enterprises to ensure they made the public better aware of their purpose and of their charges well in advance of operation, thereby avoiding antagonizing powerful interest groups. However, resistance did occur elsewhere. In July 1753 a report from Whitehaven noted, ‘a tumultuous rabble of 4 or 500 people pull’d down the turnpike at Balder Bridge (which they have done twice before within these last two years), threatening ⁶³ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxii (1752), 237. ⁶⁴ BL, Newcastle Mss., Add. Mss. 32,732, Pelham to Newcastle, 7 June 1753; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxiii (1753), 294–5, 343; Albert, ‘Popular Opposition’, 10–11.
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the lives, and to burn the houses, of some of the neighbouring gentlemen.’⁶⁵ Moreover, it may also be the case that there was in fact rather more local opposition to new turnpikes than historians to date have noted. A letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine published in May 1747 suggests as much. The writer complained bitterly about the state of a newly turnpiked road from Market Harborough to Northampton: well it was that I was in a light Berlin, and six good horses, or I might have been overlaid [overturned] in that turnpike road. But for fear of my life and limb, I walk’d several miles on foot, met 20 waggons tearing their goods to pieces, and the drivers cursing and swearing for being robb’d on the highway by a turnpike, screen’d under an act of parliament.
The author’s complaint was supported by the editor, who had himself travelled that road. But, significantly, the correspondent also noted that, when he eventually arrived, he found the inns of Northampton were filled with soldiers, billeted there to ‘prevent the country rising and cutting down the turnpikes’.⁶⁶ Such chance sources may well indicate that the battle for hearts and minds of the country people in the case of turnpikes was a rather more protracted process than might be assumed.
‘A GIDDY AND RIOTOUS POPUL ACE’: THE MILITIA RIOTS OF 1757 ⁶⁷ The problems faced by the state in maintaining civil order in early Hanoverian England was graphically brought home to all in authority by the food riots of 1740 and 1756. With the demands of war stretching the army so thinly, it could not respond to all the demands placed upon it. There is a certain irony, therefore, that Parliament’s attempt to solve this problem through the Militia Act of 1757 should have itself occasioned serious disorders. Although relatively short-lived, these disturbances again revealed a willingness to riot in regions and among populations not normally associated with disorders. The idea of a citizen army, drawn from the ordinary populace who in times of crisis would drop their ploughshares, shuttles, or account books and take up arms to defend the commonwealth, had a long history and a deep resonance in English politics, dating from the Civil War. The idea echoed the long-held distrust of ‘a standing army in the midst of peace’, which many saw as a prop to tyranny. Hence ⁶⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxiii (1753), 342. ‘Balder’ Bridge was probably a misreading of Calder Bridge. The rioters were probably miners. ⁶⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, xvii (1747), 232–3. ⁶⁷ The standard text on the English militia and on the riots of 1757 is J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 1965). There is also a very useful survey, supported by a map, by Jeremy Caple, ‘The Militia Riots of 1757’, in A. Charlesworth (ed.), Atlas of Rural Protest, in Britain (1548–1900) (Croom Helm, 1983), 124–7, and brief accounts of some of the riots in T. Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (Macmillan, 1978), 98–104.
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‘country party’ politicians in the early years of the eighteenth century often portrayed the idea of the militia not only as the alternative to a royal army of ‘foreign’ mercenaries but also as a means of preserving English liberties. Opponents of such schemes emphasized the dangers implicit in an armed and potentially volatile population. Yet the idea of a militia appealed to many both as a cheap source of manpower to suppress disorder and as a means to resist external foes. We should remember that threats of a French invasion were both frequent and very real at various times in the eighteenth century, while the ease with which the clans swept down through the country as far as Derby in the ‘45’, without any effectively resistance from the forces of the state, made a deep impression. The strains imposed by the Seven Years War on the British army finally prompted the government to act. Since further significant extension of the army found little favour for political and financial reasons, it proposed a renewed and revitalized militia. The French made use of such formations and the much-admired Prussian army was based upon conscripted men who served only two months every year. Militias were cheaper than full-time soldiers, providing a military reserve only when needed. The scheme, which initially found support only in opposition circles, became ministerial policy when the outbreak of war, the humiliating loss of Minorca, and military defeats in Canada brought Pitt, the Elder, into office. As French threats grew, support for the measure strengthened both in the southern counties, where an invasion might appear, and in Yorkshire where it was stimulated by memories of the ‘45’. The 1757 Act replaced the existing and admittedly enfeebled militia established in 1662 with a new militia in which men would serve for three years, train regularly, and hold an annual camp every Whitsun. Militiamen would be liable to call out at any time of ‘actual or imminent danger’ and would be subject to military discipline. This citizen army was to be embodied on a county basis. Officers were to be selected from the propertied classes, though it was hoped these would be volunteers. The militiamen were to be selected by means of a ballot from all males aged between 18 and 50 years old who were not otherwise exempt. To enable such a ballot to take place, every parish constable was required to draw up a list of eligible inhabitants, in effect a census of the adult male population. Lists were to be displayed on church doors to allow all to check them. They would then be presented to the Lord Lieutenants of the counties who would apportion to each parish a share of the total men required and then draw lots against the parish list to select the unlucky ‘winners’. The process therefore appeared to be ‘fair’. However, although it touched every able bodied man in every parish, those who were rich enough could buy their way out of a balloted place, either by paying a fine of £10 or by providing a substitute. The pages of the regional press thereafter carried numerous advertisements seeking substitutes. This emphasized the gap between the poorer classes, who found themselves having to ‘defend’ the property of the county, and the wealthier property owners who could escape this responsibility. From the start this rankled.
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The compilation of militia lists generally passed off quietly, but when attempts were made to embody the new militia major disorders arose. These were in part informed by the widespread, but unfounded, fear put about by opponents of the measure that those balloted would be liable to serve abroad. Although the Act in fact specifically exempted the militia from foreign service, a well-publicized forced deployment abroad of men enlisted into the army in 1756, contrary to promises to the contrary, gave credence to such concerns.⁶⁸ However, the main objection was that the process bore hardest on those who could least afford the time involved, namely those peasant proprietors who employed only their immediate families on their holdings and who could not afford to replace household labour with hired help, and on the labourers themselves who would lose their sole income. The mood of hostility was not helped by continuing food shortages and the high cost of grain, which triggered riots more or less continually from the autumn of 1756 into the following summer. Fears that the harvest of 1757 would, if anything, be worse than the previous year’s exacerbated tensions. Militia service no doubt always generated resentment. But the uniform and open process of selecting men by balloting focused attention across the country on a procedure that proved vulnerable to mass protest. Strikingly it was not the ‘manufacturing’ but the essentially agrarian districts that saw the worst conflicts. Trouble first broke out in Bedfordshire at the end of August. The disturbances here set the pattern for future riots: outrage greeted the process of the parish constables making their lists but it was only when the lists were collected prior to balloting that sufficient critical mass was generated and the crowd prompted to intervene. At Biggleswade the justices assembled to conduct the selection but found themselves threatened with a ‘mob’ numbering over 1,000 who expressed their determination to prevent the process continuing. The magistrates fled, leaving the lists at the Sun public house where they were seized and destroyed. It was clear, however, that the rioters, once triumphant, had no intention of returning quietly to work.⁶⁹ A week later, the Duke of Bedford was complaining that the soldiers sent to restore order ‘are not sufficient to defend this whole county from the insolence of a riotous rabble, who flushed with success they have met with, cannot be quieted without a more considerable force than we have at present’.⁷⁰ The magistrates remained severely frightened and unwilling to assemble. One had been confronted by a mob that came to his house and demanded the local lists. Bedford himself was warned that a mob of some 6,000 were planning to march on his seat at Woburn. Soon no less than nine troops of cavalry were in the county but angry crowds still threatened disorder, in one case being prevented from an attack on a leading justice’s house only by their timely interception by troops.⁷¹ ⁶⁸ ⁶⁹ ⁷⁰ ⁷¹
Western, The English Militia, 298–9. WO 4/54, Burgoyne to Barrington, Bedford to Barrington, 31 August 1757. WO 1/973, Bedford to Barrington, 7 September 1757. Ibid.; Bullock to Bedford, n.d.; Hayter, The Army and the Crowd, 106, 100.
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On 1 September Bedford presciently warned of the consequences that ‘the bad example of suffering a giddy and riotous populace to stand in opposition to an Act of Parliament unnoticed, may have upon the rest of the kingdom.’⁷² But it was already too late. On 31 August disturbances broke out in the Gamingay district, just over the county border in Cambridgeshire where an angry crowd seized the parish lists from the high constable. On 5 September riots greeted the attempts by the Hertfordshire magistrates to hold a ballot. Their meeting in Berkhamstead was surrounded and, though the magistrates tried for several hours to persuade the crowd to disperse, in the end they were forced to hand over the collected lists, which were destroyed. Again the crowd threatened to pull down the justices’ houses should any more lists be compiled. The magistrates at Royston provided food and drink for a large crowd that marched there and were made to promise never to assist in future execution of the Act.⁷³ Even when troops arrived, the crowd remained a potent presence. The Earl of Hardwicke noted, ‘By terror of the Blues [cavalry] at Royston, we are at present pretty quiet; but still there are rumours of menaces to rise.’⁷⁴ As attempts to implement the Act continued, similar events occurred. The neighbouring counties of Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire were swept up in riots, as were Norfolk, Essex, and Middlesex. In Surrey disturbances followed the same pattern while in Kent the meeting at Sevenoaks was broken up and Lord George Sackville besieged in his home at Knowle Park.⁷⁵ The Lincolnshire county meeting at Boston had to be abandoned when large crowds ‘made a great riot’ and ‘committed great outrages’. They smashed the windows of a prominent aristocrat and threatened to march on the Lincoln races ‘in order to attack some of the nobility who they think were the occasion of making this act’. At Mansfield the Nottinghamshire county meeting was broken up by a crowd of some 500 who demanded the militia lists. They ‘took them by force and carried them in triumph through the town.’ They were not gentle: ‘none of the gentlemen who were present escaped without receiving marks of their resentment’.⁷⁶ In Derbyshire, too, all the lists were seized.⁷⁷ In Gloucestershire massive crowds roamed the Cotswold parishes seizing lists. The county meeting to swear in balloted men was forcibly broken up by rioters.⁷⁸ Even more extensive disturbances broke out when the authorities in Yorkshire attempted to implement the Act. Yorkshire had, as noted, been one of the leading counties supporting the bill, indicating the lack of awareness which county authorities displayed when judging the mood of the populace. It was not the industrial West Riding which saw the worst disturbances but the agrarian East ⁷² SP 36/138, Bedford to Holdernesse, 1 September 1757. ⁷³ Western, The English Militia, 293–4. ⁷⁴ BL, Newcastle Mss., Add. Mss. 32,874, Hardwicke to Newcastle, 19 September 1757. ⁷⁵ Western, The English Militia, 293. ⁷⁶ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvii (1757), 431. ⁷⁷ Western, The English Militia, 293. ⁷⁸ SP 36/138, Hanger to Pitt, 6 November 1757; SP 44/189, Pitt to Barrington, 8 November 1757; Pitt to Hanger, 8 November 1757; Gloucester Journal, 14 January 1758.
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Riding. Well before the Riding meeting crowds were threatening the high constable and gentry. On 12 September a crowd near Beverley forced the constable to hand over his lists. They then marched into the town and began to demolish a house until persuaded to leave by some gentlemen who provided them with money for drink.⁷⁹ The next day a huge crowd ‘of farmers and country people’, ‘armed with guns, scythes and clubs’, assembled and, allegedly led by local constables, marched upon the house of Sir Henry Willoughby, High Sheriff of Yorkshire. There they forced him to agree to take no further part in implementing the Act and to request the Lord Lieutenant to abandon its implementation. Humiliated—‘My authority as Sheriff is gone’—Willoughby recommended that their demands were complied with, ‘thoroughly satisfying the people in time that there will be no meeting’.⁸⁰ Further lists were seized and gentry threatened. Other justices, like Willoughby, agreed not to implement the Act. Given such pressure, the Lord Lieutenant acquiesced and on 15 September issued a notice postponing all meetings.⁸¹ The government was not sympathetic. However, with troops in short supply and riots everywhere, they could not provide sufficient resources to retrieve the situation. And, in the absence of troops, the ‘mobs’ grew bolder. Sir Rowland Wynn informed the ministry that they were now attacking mills as food prices remained so high.⁸² Disorder spread into the North Riding. The meeting called for 15 September at York to ballot for men for the Bulmer wapentake was called off when no deputies attended, the result of the forceful coercion of the magistrates. Instead, large crowds converged on the city and destroyed the inn where the meeting should have taken place. They also seized lists and destroyed them. As the crowd’s confidence grew, further issues were raised: ‘enclosures, game associations, broad wheels, and many others have been mentioned’, reported Lord Dupplin.⁸³ In contrast, the authorities in the more populous industrial West Riding managed to complete the process of balloting without disorder. An angry crowd at Sheffield threatened to attack the nearby home of the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Rockingham, at Woodhouse, but he drew up his tenants into an armed body and no rioters came.⁸⁴ The Leeds deputies, no doubt under extreme pressure, asked him to allow them to give up the lists but they were dissuaded and a meeting was duly held at Doncaster. When crowds arrived there, they were persuaded to depart peacefully but empty-handed.⁸⁵ The militia riots shook the government and prompted a reappraisal of the measure in the form of a new bill to ‘explain’ the Militia Act. It was passed in the ⁷⁹ Western, The English Militia, 291. ⁸⁰ Ibid.; BL, Newcastle Mss., Add. Mss. 32,874, Chomley to Newcastle, 14 September 1757; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvii (1757), 43; Hayter, The Army and the Crowd, 102. ⁸¹ BL, Newcastle Mss., Add. Mss. 32,874, Irwin to Newcastle 15 September 1757. ⁸² Ibid., Wynn to Newcastle, 22 September 1757. ⁸³ Western, The English Militia, 292; BL, Newcastle Mss., Add. Mss. 32,874, Dupplin to Newcastle, 24 September 1757. ⁸⁴ BL, Newcastle Mss., Add. Mss. 32,874, Rockingham to Newcastle, 24 September 1757. ⁸⁵ Western, The English Militia, 293.
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spring of 1758. The new measure sought to remedy problems with the original Act, including the introduction of financial provision for the dependents of men balloted and on active service, mechanisms for providing for men who fell ill when away from home, and extra pay for corporals who would now be eligible to become sergeants. The bill also introduced heavy penalties for anyone obstructing the militia process. Great pressure was also brought to bear on the landed classes to volunteer for commissions in the militia. These measure had some effect but it was only when invasion again seemed possible in 1759 that the public debate was won by the proponents of the militia and popular hostility towards the measure began to abate. Many counties now embodied a militia without further resistance. Acceptance of the militia was bolstered by ‘patriotic’ events such as the anniversary of the King’s accession and celebrations to welcome Wolfe’s famous capture of Quebec. Care was taken to present the militia in the best of lights. For example, from Chippenham it was reported that ‘Capt. Montagu’s company of the Wiltshire Battalion was drawn out, and made an extreme genteel appearance, dressed in their white Garters and their hair well powdered. In the evening they marched round the town in most excellent order, led by their own and other officers in the same regiment.’ At Axbridge, before the ‘greatest concourse of people’, ‘Major Prowle’s company of the militia went through their manual exercise and firings with great regularity and exactness; after which the Major gave an elegant entertainment to his officers and company.’ At Devizes, the thanksgiving for the successes of war were led by the militia who ‘paraded in the Green . . . proceeded by a band of music, to the market place, where they fired three volleys’.⁸⁶ The apparently rapid decline of mass militant hostility to the Militia Act has encouraged historians to assume that the riots represented merely a lack of popular understanding of the measure. The leading historian of these disorders, J. R. Western, notes, ‘These disturbances were mainly due to a misunderstanding of the law. There was little trouble once it was understood that real conscription was not to be introduced.’⁸⁷ Stevenson sees ‘the sheer novelty of the legislation’ as a contributing factor.⁸⁸ However, we should not underestimate the seriousness of the disorders. Unlike other riots over food or wages, where the rioters claimed some sort of legitimacy for their actions, the militia riots were a direct defiance of the right of the state to muster forces for its own internal defence. Nor should we be too easily persuaded that popular hostility was simply replaced by acceptance. Disturbances continued to interrupt the embodying of the militia. Kent, so keen on reinforcing the defences against invasion, experienced four separate disturbances against the militia between 1759 and 1761 and there were further disturbances in Huntingdon, Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire, and Denbighshire. In 1769 riots again broke out in Bedfordshire while in 1778 Sussex saw riots opposing the militia.⁸⁹ In County Durham in 1761 a large crowd marched on Gateshead where ⁸⁶ Bath Journal, 25 June, 9 July, 12 December 1759. ⁸⁷ Western, The English Militia, 290–1. ⁸⁸ Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, 46. ⁸⁹ Western, The English Militia, 298. More research is needed on these disturbances.
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they insisted that ‘the Gentlemen in the County would find men to fill up the vacancies’. A similar action took place at Morpeth, but at Hexham, in Northumberland, when a crowd claimed to number some 7,000–8,000 miners demanded the same agreement, the authorities turned the Yorkshire militia, who were quartered in the town, against them. The Riot Act was read ‘several times’ in a futile attempt to disperse the crowd who confronted the militia, ‘to the very point of the bayonets’. After two hours the militia were ordered to open fire, and anything from twenty to sixty men, depending on source, were shot dead.⁹⁰ The very strength of popular opposition to the Militia Act in some respects ensured its eventual establishment. Although the landed classes had been in many cases lukewarm and in others positively hostile to the measure, they could not countenance disorder on this scale. Nor could they tolerate so direct a challenge to the rule of Parliament. If the mob were allowed to overthrow one piece of legislation because they disliked it, what might be the next? Their lack of enthusiasm for the measure could be turned to advantage when it came to seeking to persuade the crowd to accept the modified militia in 1758. Then the gentry showed their colours by coming forward to fill the commissioned posts in the militia, though, interestingly, it was predominantly Tories who did so, to the chagrin of the ruling Whigs.⁹¹
CONCLUSION It is evident that the riots examined above were led and dominated by ‘country people’. In Staffordshire, as at Charnwood, protest emanated from the commoners who lived in the villages around the Chase and Forest. While they gained support from larger farmers and from the labouring poor, the miners, nailers, and crafts who lived in these communities, it was the small farmers and tenants who were most affected by the threat posed by the rabbits. In the West Country, the opponents of the turnpikes were, the miners of Kingswood and Radstock apart, entirely ‘country people’. The Somerset rioters were made up of farmers and labourers, openly led by a ‘young Gentleman Farmer of Nailsey’. The three men seized at Bristol in August 1749 were all ‘pull’d off their horses’, indicating that they were substantial farmers, while one of the thirty men arrested at Totterdown was also a ‘farmer’. He later died in gaol from cutlass wounds.⁹² Most, though, of those taken up were described as labourers. Among those indicted after the Ledbury riots were two ‘husbandmen’, a ‘yeoman’, many labourers and farm servants, two carpenters, a bargeman, and a distiller. The Yorkshire rioters too ⁹⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxi (1761), 137–8: Hayter, The Army and the Crowd, 177. ⁹¹ Western notes, ‘The gentry’s almost complete lack of zeal in carrying out the militia act and the care now taken to explain it to the people and to amend it must have done much to lessen tension and complete the work of pacification.’ Western, The English Militia, 296–7. ⁹² Western Flying Post, 7, 21 August 1749.
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were described as being mainly farmers and labourers, even though the riots here were deep in the heart of the textile-making region. Given that the master clothiers in the domestic system usually combined agriculture with cloth making, there was often little clear difference. There was, in fact, precious little ‘urban’ support for any of these riots. Although many of the disturbances occurred in towns, the rioters came from the countryside. Indeed, there was an element of ‘country v town’ in many cases. At Biggleswade the anti-militia rioters levied contributions of food and drink on the inhabitants, smashed their windows, and threatened to pull down the houses of any who should assist in raising a militia in future.⁹³ At Ledbury, rioters levied tolls on the local inhabitants for smashing the turnpikes. The inhabitants of such towns shared little sympathy for the rioters. At Bristol, the local middling sort were prepared to resist the anti-turnpike rioters with force. At York in 1757, where rioters destroyed the inn where the ballot was to have taken place, the mayor was rapidly able to raise body of some 500 respectable inhabitants to protect the town from further disorder. The same was true at Leeds.⁹⁴ In contrast, urban workers and rural industrial workers seem to have found little reason to support these protests. Bristol workers did nothing to assist the turnpike rioters, while the manufacturing or mining districts offered no assistance to resist the Militia Act. At the core of these protests, then, were small-scale owner-occupiers, the largely forgotten English peasantry. Use of this term, as employed by Jeanette Neeson in her outstanding study of the role of common rights and enclosure, will raise eyebrows, since most historians assert with confidence that the English peasantry was at best ‘vestigial’ by the end of the eighteenth century, having been replaced by ‘smallholders’ who farmed their land for a living or ‘labourers-with-land’.⁹⁵ Certainly, when compared to Continental Europe, the percentage of land occupied by the ‘lesser freeholders’ was small, and shrinking as the century passed.⁹⁶ However, we should not underestimate the numbers involved. Whereas the debate about the decline of the small freeholder has tended to concentrate upon those who owned and occupied from 30 to 300 acres,⁹⁷ such men would have been seen within the village as substantial farmers, many of whom might well have been renting additional land from the gentry and be employing waged labour as well as their own families. In very many villages a far larger number of occupiers held plots of land that, if insufficient to live on from purely agricultural production, nonetheless provided them with a significant part of their subsistence, which might then be supplemented by waged work, petty production, or trading. ⁹³ WO 4/54, Burgoyne to Barrington, 31 August 1757. ⁹⁴ BL, Newcastle Mss., Add. Mss. 32,874, Wynn to Newcastle, 22 September 1757; Western, The English Militia, 296. ⁹⁵ Historians of both left and right are in fact remarkably chary of employing the term at all. See the discussion in Jeanette Neeson, Commoners, 299–304. ⁹⁶ G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 23–6. ⁹⁷ This is the range set by Mingay, English Landed Society, 26, a study that remains influential.
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While, as a percentage of ownership, their holdings were negligible, as a percentage of owner-occupiers they often constituted the largest group. Thus, at Wigston Magna in Leicestershire in 1765, some 99 out of 200 families owned a plot of land ranging from 10 to 15 acres down to an acre or so. Jeanette Neeson’s study of twenty-three unenclosed parishes in Northamptonshire in the late eighteenth century shows that overall some 53 per cent of the population owned some land.⁹⁸ They formed, therefore, a social group which, though increasingly hard-pressed, could, as a result of their relative independence, provide a core of resistance both to the rampant advance of agrarian capitalism in the countryside and to threats to the economy of petty production. This core of resistance is even more remarkable when one notes that the districts prominent in these riots were far from the ‘usual’ location of eighteenthcentury popular protests.⁹⁹ Yet in each case, they generated very large crowds of protestors. Reports speak of hundreds involved in all these riots, with thousands being referred to in some of the anti-militia demonstrations. Even allowing for understandable exaggeration, such numbers are noticeably larger than those found in many food riots or industrial disturbances. Taken with the fact that populations in individual country parishes were rarely large, these numbers reflect in a very real sense the mobilization of entire communities. These were essentially riots of petty producers, not of consumers. In all three cases, it was the threats posed to the productive economies of ‘country people’ that mobilized resistance. The rabbits threatened the ability of peasant farmers to maintain their sheep flocks. Whereas the larger farmers might have sufficient land to ignore this loss, they could not. The tolls that the turnpike trusts intended to levy on carts and animals using the road on the way to and from markets likewise posed a real threat to small farmers. To large farmers the advantages of better roads opening up wider and more lucrative markets might outweigh these immediate costs, but to peasant producers, who relied upon selling small quantities regularly at local markets, the tolls appeared as a tax upon already narrow profit margins. Retailing anything from milk, potatoes, vegetables, cider, nuts, or roughly made furniture, many of these petty commodity dealers came from the ‘scratch as scratch can’ economy of the peasant proprietor. Likewise, many butter sellers, who filled market places with their wares, were the wives and daughters of peasant occupiers whose cattle, often grazing permanently upon the commons and wastes, supplied them with this means to a semi-subsistence. The Kingswood colliers also fit this pattern: their supplementary economy carrying small coal to Bristol on packhorses was directly threatened by the toll. Yorkshire small farmers and clothiers likewise resented the threat of tolls as weekly they carried both their agricultural produce and finished cloths, laden onto the backs of their packhorses, ⁹⁸ W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant (1957), 217–18; Neeson, Commoners, 304–19. ⁹⁹ This may be seen by comparison of the maps in Andrew Charlesworth’s excellent volume, Atlas of Rural Protest.
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to the cloth halls and markets for sale. The Militia Act too was seen as bearing down disproportionately on the small farmers and producers who needed the ‘free’ labour of their sons to maintain their holdings, and on the labourers who would lose their work if balloted. Some sense of the burden may be seen from the ballot list for the village of Yardley Gobion in Northamptonshire in 1777. This listed four farmers and two of their sons, two bakers and two tailors, a butcher, a horse dealer, a hog dealer, five servants, and nine labourers.¹⁰⁰ A further notable character of these protests is the very evident lack of deference displayed to the local authorities. Whereas food rioters and industrial rioters were generally careful not to attack the magistracy directly, seeing them as potential allies or at least as arbitrators, the militia rioters frequently attacked, or threatened, the property and persons of the justices. Since many of the participants would have been known to them, such brazen behaviour can only reflect the deep sense of outrage that the Militia Act elicited. The surprising paucity of prosecutions following these extensive disorders no doubt reflected the real fright that the justices had experienced. The Gloucestershire rioters ‘were discharged upon payment of small fines, the court having shown the utmost leniency’.¹⁰¹ They also wanted to restore ‘normal’ social relations as quickly as possible. Justices were also directly threatened by the Bristol and Yorkshire turnpike rioters, as were the trustees, many of them wealthy landlords, while a justice at Ledbury found his house the centre of a pitched battle. The brazen flaunting of their ‘colours’ outside Uxbridge’s house by the Cannock Chase protestors emphasized the directness of the attack that he faced, for all his wealth and power. The lack of any attempt at disguise shown by the anti-militia rioters is in contrast to the fact that many turnpike rioters were disguised. Even though the 1723 Black Act had made going in disguise, in effect having blackened faces, with intent to commit felony a capital crime, many were blacked. The Kingswood miners, of course, had blackened faces from their occupation. This served to preserve their anonymity and helps explain why it proved so difficult to bring charges against them if they were not seized in the act. The crowd who demolished the Toghill gates near Bristol in 1749 included some who were ‘naked with only trousers on, some in their shirts’.¹⁰² One of the two leaders of the Somerset rioters had his face blacked and so did most of the large crowd at Ledbury. The turnpike rioters around Bristol and in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire were also notable for the frequency with which they disguised themselves in women’s clothing. This was particularly the case with the Somerset rioters from the second attack on the gates at Bedminster. Many of the Ledbury rioters who fought with the justices on the Hereford road also wore women’s clothes and had blackened faces, including Thomas Reynolds and James Bayliss. And the rioters who attacked the gates ¹⁰⁰ R. Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (Harper Collins, 2001), 99–100. ¹⁰¹ Gloucester Journal, 14 January 1758. ¹⁰² Western Flying Post, 7 August 1749.
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between Marshfield and Chippenham in 1727 were described as ‘being dress’d in Women’s Cloaths and high crown’d Hats’.¹⁰³ Wearing women’s clothing certainly made identification of perpetrators no easier, but it is hard to square this explanation with the fact that the rioters made no effort at secrecy. For example, the large crowd who converged on Bedminster had earlier announced both intention and time of their arrival and expected no quarter. ‘Real’ women were also involved in many riots, in as far as we can tell. Their presence was particularly noted in several riots around Ledbury, where Elizabeth Walters was particularly active in encouraging the mob to attack Justice Skipp’s house.¹⁰⁴ These disturbances also gave rise to both a political and a class dimension. For example, the East Riding protestors asserted that the Militia Act compelled ‘the poorer sort to contribute equally with the rich’.¹⁰⁵ And as these disturbances spread, there was growing ‘talk of gentry having been long enough in possession of their estates’. An anonymous letter sent to two Lincolnshire magistrates echoed the anger felt by the smaller peasant proprietors and poor. ‘We will not fight for what does not concern us and belongs to our landlords’, it stated, ‘let the worst happen: we can but be tenants and labourers as at present.’ The writer poured scorn on pretensions of paternal responsibility. If a poor man found himself balloted, ‘which of you buntin-ars’d coated fellows will maintain his family?’ If the gentry wanted men to fight for them, they should hire them themselves ‘by the assistance of your long green purses’. If the Just-Asses and the other start up Officers that buys a Commission for a Trifle and sells his Nation to make his Fortune when he comes abroad, and throws Thousands of Poor men’s lives away about it, such men as those sho’d behave well to their tennants at home: Then they would have the Countreyes Goodwill, for ’tis the Farmers that maintains both the poor and such as they too.¹⁰⁶
Turnpikes, like enclosures later, were seen to emanate from that political elite with access to Westminster who were thereby able to privatize a common asset and make money from it. In Gloucestershire it was claimed that only the turnpikes run by Whigs were attacked: it is particularly remarkable that here, where the Money . . . has been lent by Gentlemen who are well affected to the Government, no Turnpike has been spar’d, but that at ¹⁰³ Malcolmson, ‘ “A Set of Ungovernable People” ’, 95. ¹⁰⁴ One riot in the Scottish central lowlands against turnpikes was conducted by men in women’s cloths while the most famous riots against turnpikes, the Rebecca riots of 1843, of course, saw all the male participants dressed as women. Albert, ‘Popular Opposition’, 10–11; K. J. Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland 1780–1815 (Edinburgh 1979), 180; D. Williams, The Rebecca Riots (University of Wales, 1959). Andrew Charlesworth, et al. have drawn attention to the parallels with rural rituals such as ‘rough music’ and to ‘skimmingtons’ in which such ‘disguise’ was common, to mummers’ plays and to ‘lords of misrule’ and carnival, A. Charlesworth, et al., ‘The Jack-a-Lent Riots and Opposition to Turnpikes in the Bristol Region in 1749’, in Randall and Charlesworth, Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest, 46–68. ¹⁰⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxvii (1757), 431. ¹⁰⁶ Western, The English Militia, 300.
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Cirencester, where the Money which has been lent . . . by Gentlemen who are thought to be not well affected to the Government, no Turnpike has been touch’d.¹⁰⁷
The earlier turnpikes around Bath, run by Tory gentlemen, were also left alone. If true, this emphasized that deep distrust of Whig ‘enterprise’ expressed in The Beggars’ Opera. As an agricultural labourer from Ledbury put it, ‘he looked upon such Gentlemen as were for Erecting Turnpikes abo’t Ledbury the same as those that robbed on the Highway.’¹⁰⁸ In all these disturbances the protestors drew some support, if only tactic, from gentlemen who shared their dislike of innovation. This was particularly the case in the turnpike riots when many local gentry were markedly unenthusiastic in their defence of the trusts. Many shared the view that the turnpikes were legal theft. The mayor of Bristol blamed the trust for undue haste in erecting gates while Wesley and many Tory gentlemen argued that the rich should fund the roads.¹⁰⁹ Prominent supporters encouraged those rioters held for the Ledbury riots. The Treasury Solicitor noted to Newcastle, ‘Upon Inquiry I found that the prisoners had been visited and spirited up, whilst in Gaol, by Numbers of People and even by some of the Persons who were upon the Jury.’¹¹⁰ It was for this reason that the trials were moved to Worcester, to Salisbury, where the jury acquitted, and, in the case of Baylis and Reynolds, to London. It was this respectable opposition which led the government to issue its many proclamations concerning the legal status of turnpikes and the penalties for attacking them: they were aimed at the rich and propertied as much as at the poor. Such protests could not be condoned: they were, the Attorney General exclaimed in 1749, an ‘open public insult upon government and upon the laws’. They also threatened to undermine the very basis of taxation. As the Ledbury trust warned in 1734: if this Insolent and Rebellious spirit . . . be not speedily suppressed, their Impunity may by degrees lead them on to more flagrant Instances of Rebellion; till they come at length forcibly to oppose the collecting of any tax or Payment, however, legally raised, for the Service of the Public & Support of the Government.¹¹¹
The authorities in 1757 made the same pleas, with no greater results. While the justices were rarely willing to be seen to support the rioters, they were often very backward in seeking to resist the protesters. We might finally wonder why, given the ferocity of these riots by the ‘country people’, they did not appear more frequently in eighteenth-century protests? In part the answer lies in the unique character of the triggers to resistance in these cases. The extended rabbit warrens of Cannock Chase and Charnwood impacted upon many parishes in a context of deepening social fracture in their localities. ¹⁰⁷ P. Langford, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Clarendon, 1975), 121. ¹⁰⁸ Cited in Albert, ‘Popular Opposition’, 6. ¹⁰⁹ SP 36/11, Attorney General to Newcastle, 15 September 1749; Charlesworth et al., ‘The Jack-a-Lents’, 62. ¹¹⁰ SP 36/38, Paxton to Newcastle, 24 March 1736. ¹¹¹ SP 36/11, Attorney General to Newcastle, 15 September 1749.
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The triumph of the commoners at Charnwood and the heavy defeat of the Cannock Chase men both undermined future resistance. Although similar circumstances were to threaten other parishes in the later century as enclosure swept change through many villages, they only rarely impacted beyond the one parish. Moreover, powers of resistance in many districts had waned with the deterioration of the peasants’ economic position. Turnpikes, too, impacted upon a wide geography and, as we have noted, continued to generate fear whenever they were introduced. Yet it was at this early stage at which resistance was most likely. When they became more commonplace, and trusts became more acute in their pricing policy, their presence was increasingly accepted, or grudgingly tolerated. Finally, the Militia Act impacted upon the entire population of the countryside, while providing a series of focal points at which disaffection could foregather. The government quickly amended the Act to defuse the situation. Yet similar riots were to greet the successor act in 1797 in several regions. ‘Country people’ did not lose their capacity to resist. But their rulers, alarmed by the results of these unexpected examples of rural protest, likewise could learn to adapt their weapons of paternal benevolence and coercion to better manage their local populations. We can see this in microcosm if we review the way in which the militia were eventually ‘tamed’. In 1771 the Somerset militia, on exercises at Taunton, mutinied over the failure to issue new clothing to all the men. The troops, the worse for drink, became very truculent at evening roll call and some were seized by the officers and put in the guard house. In the struggle to free them, one private was killed. The officers managed to persuade the men that they would indeed receive new clothing and the next day, reviewed by their colonel, they ‘went regularly through their exercises and firings, before several thousand spectators, when they gave general satisfaction, since which everything remained quiet to the day of their dismission’.¹¹² ¹¹² Bath Chronicle, 20 June 1771.
8 Nobs and Mobs: Political Disorders In 1806 the redoubtable radical, William Cobbett, in his indefatigable efforts to proselytize for the cause of parliamentary reform, visited the borough of Honiton in Devon. The town was notoriously venal. Elections throughout the previous century had been marked by the most transparent sale and purchase of votes. His exhortations to the citizens to espouse the cause of reform, to demand open election by a wider electorate and an end to corruption, were not well received. He recorded: After . . . I addressed [them] telling them how wicked and detestable it was to take bribes, most of the corrupt villains laughed in my face; but some of the women actually cried out against me as I went along the streets, as a man that had come to rob them of their blessing. The whole of the inhabitants of this borough, the whole of the persons who return two members to Parliament, are bound together in an indissoluble chain of venality.¹
This indissoluble chain of venality characterized eighteenth-century formal politics and raises questions for the historian of popular protest, for elections were often characterized by popular disorder. How far did popular political disturbances reflect the patterns discernible in other forms of popular protest, or were they entirely different in character? Were they in any respect manifestations of a wider popular political awareness, or were they merely examples of the ‘hired’ mob, reflecting a ‘pre-industrial’ mentalité? To address these questions, it is necessary first to examine the structure of formal politics.
THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICS The Glorious Revolution ensconced the supposedly ‘balanced’ constitution of King, Lords, and Commons, lauded by apologists such as Locke as the best possible form of government. In the light of what had gone before, such a view was not without its merits. Whereas James II had threatened a return towards more despotic power structures, justified by the ‘divine right of kings’, the 1688 taming of the monarchy within a parliamentary system marked a major step forward into ¹ Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 8 February 1806.
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a modern age. The twin dangers of monarchical autocracy and aristocratic oligarchy were, it was asserted, now held in check by the Commons, thereby maintaining a proper accountability of the executive and guaranteeing the continued enjoyment by all of the maximum possible liberty within the rule of law and justice. As in all enduring myths, there was more than a shred of truth underpinning such claims. However, the fundamental weakness in such claims lay in the system of representation that placed men in the Commons. The House of Commons was the main constitutional beneficiary of the Glorious Revolution. Its authority was cemented and it remained the centre of political power thereafter. It is worth looking briefly at the structure of its representation. The House was made up of 558 MPs, of whom 489 represented English constituencies, 24 Welsh ones, and 45 Scottish seats. Of the English representatives, some 80 MPs sat, two each, for the 40 counties, 4 represented the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the rest, 405, sat for the 203 enfranchised boroughs. English parliamentary boroughs were far from evenly distributed. Sussex (20), Surrey (14), and Kent (10), together with the Cinque Ports (16), were represented by some 60 MPs. London and Middlesex (8 seats) along with Berkshire (9) and Hampshire (26) made up a further 43 members. The counties of Cornwall (44), Devon (26), Somerset (18), Dorset (20), and Wiltshire (34) between them accounted for another 142 members, or over 25 per cent of all MPs. In all, the 11 counties south of a line from Bristol to London sent 245 MPs to Westminster, some 50 per cent of all English MPs, or 44 per cent of the total Commons. Even allowing for the fact that population patterns had changed substantially since the Middle Ages, this was acknowledged as a ludicrous imbalance. However, the system offered some compensation, at least to the aspirant member. The political nation was small and, by the eighteenth century, there was little expectation that boroughs, particularly those in the south, would be represented solely, if at all, by ‘local’ men, so there were plenty of opportunities to enter the Commons for those who sought election. There were perhaps 245,000 eligible voters in England in 1760 out of a total population of perhaps some 6,000,000, but, as with constituencies, they were not evenly distributed. The largest constituencies were the county seats where the elective franchise remained that set in 1430, namely for those in possession of a freehold of land worth 40s. As money values declined in real terms, smaller landholders qualified for the vote, so that by 1760 county voters made up around 160,000 of the total English electorate. The largest county, Yorkshire, had some 15,000 voters in 1741, rising to 23,000 in 1818. The smallest, Rutland, had only 609 voters in 1760. However, since voting took place in the open on the hustings and votes were recorded in the poll books for all to inspect, the county voter in any sort of dependent position usually voted in accordance with the opinions of those who ruled their lives. Thus at elections candidates solicited the gentry, clergy, and freeholders not only for their votes but also for their ‘interest’, in other words the votes of those who needed to ‘oblige’ them with deference. It was taken for
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granted that a landlord’s tenants would support the candidate whom he chose. Not doing so risked the possibility of eviction and the certainty of the odium, for a period at least, of a powerful figure within the local community. That said, the size of the electorate in most counties made them unpredictable, particularly where, as in the case of Middlesex or Warwickshire, there were significant numbers of urban voters whose property holding earned them the franchise. County elections, with so many voters to be canvassed and ‘treated’ with favours, cash, and festivities, were very expensive. The English boroughs were the key to electoral power. Here the franchise varied widely from ‘pot walloper’ constituencies, where almost any resident in the borough who owned a hearth and could boil a pot might vote, right through to burgage tenure constituencies where only the owners of specified properties might vote. The differences in the nominal franchise, however, was less important than the number of those actually able to vote. Gatton in Surrey had a nominally open franchise but it had only six inhabitants and two voters after 1754. It was the most notorious ‘rotten’ borough of them all. Electorates in boroughs varied widely: Westminster mustered around 9,000 voters by the 1760s, the City of London 6,000, and Bristol 5,000. Here election contests at times took on a genuinely ‘political’ hue with the large issues of the day—war, peace, tax—dividing electors on lines of policy.² On the other hand, none of the Cinque Port towns had an electorate of over 40, while not one of the many Cornish boroughs had more than 200: most numbered fewer than 20. Old Sarum, or ‘that accursed hill’ as Cobbett called it, outside the city of Salisbury, had only three voters in 1728, rising to five in 1734. Along with Gatton, it epitomized the worst, or the best, of nomination boroughs where one man owned the constituency and sent himself, or his nominee, to Westminster as a matter of property. Such political influence did not come cheap. The estate containing Gatton was regularly put on the market. It was sold for £23,000 in 1751 and several times thereafter, in 1801 selling for £90,000, so it proved an appreciating asset.³ It was entirely in keeping with the defensive character of the early Hanoverian state that one of its very earliest acts was intended to limit the frequency of parliamentary elections. The Triennial Act, passed in 1694 as part of the struggle between William III and Parliament, had reduced the duration of parliaments to three years. The Septennial Act of 1715 lengthened them to seven years. For the Whig magnates and George I, less frequent elections could only be a good thing, a view strengthened by the unprecedented experience of the ten general elections held in the twenty years from 1695 to 1715. They had been characterized by acute ² The outstanding study of urban popular politics in the period is Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989). ³ R. Sedgwick, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1715–54 (History of Parliament Trust, London, 1970) i. 329. By the eve of the Great Reform Act, its value had doubled to £180,000. F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties. The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), 149.
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political turbulence and exceptional levels of election violence across the country. The Septennial Act also augmented the power of those in office, since it shielded them for longer from the voters. It also allowed elected members longer to get their snouts into the parliamentary trough of patronage and sinecures and thereby acquire a return on the considerable outlay involved in securing election in the first place. However, it also inevitably made elections much more important and the cost of losing far higher, both politically and financially. Much more energy had to be expended on ‘managing’ the electoral process since scarcity increased value: the price of votes, and seats, rose rapidly. While parliaments were lengthened, the ‘problem’ of the widened franchises from Anne’s reign was tackled in the Last Determinations Act of 1729, which further augmented the power of the elected as against the electors by allowing Parliament to determine the character of the franchise in the case of disputed elections, which were frequent. Walpole and the Whigs used this measure to ensure the triumph of their own candidates, to further diminish the openness of elections and to reduce voter numbers. Their aim was broadly realized. O’Gorman believes that the ratio of voters to population fell in real terms by some 20 per cent in the years from 1689 to 1754. The proportion of ‘nomination’ boroughs likewise rose, from around 20 per cent of total constituencies in 1715 to nearly 30 per cent in 1800.⁴ It is clear that the grip of the Whig oligarchy on Westminster elections extended and tightened as the first half century of Hanoverian rule passed. However, victory was by no means complete, in part because the Tory and dissident Whig opposition fiercely resisted the naked opportunism of the ministry. In fact, the number of contested elections actually rose after 1715. In that year there were some 119 contested elections in the 314 individual constituencies. In 1722 there were 154. But thereafter they declined, in 1727 to 114, in 1741 to 62, and in 1761 to only 53. The largest fall was witnessed in county elections, the most expensive arenas. Thus between 1701 and 1734 Cheshire witnessed contests in eight of ten general elections, but the county saw not one election thereafter until after the passage of the Great Reform Act in 1832. Shropshire likewise held six contests in eight elections between 1701 and 1722, but did not hold another until 1831. Gloucestershire managed eight between 1701 and 1734, then none until 1784. Even this was only a token contest, which closed after only twenty votes had been polled.⁵ Further, Cannon notes that, after mid-century, county representation tended to be concentrated in fewer families. Indeed, only in three out of forty counties was this trend not followed.⁶ This suggests, that the gentry, who, earlier in the century, had in many counties been allowed to nominate one of their own as one ‘Knight of the Shire’, an honour much valued by the greater gentry,⁷ were ⁴ F. O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (Arnold, 1997), 140–1. ⁵ Gloucester Journal, 5, 12 April 1784. ⁶ J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973), 36. ⁷ Sir L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (Macmillan, 1968), 70–1.
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being squeezed out thereafter. Unable to compete with the capacious purses of Whig aristocrats or mercantile wealth for a borough seat, their frustration was to erupt in the 1770s in the Association Movement. Contests in boroughs were much harder to stop. Here the question was decided on whether one interest could maintain control and thereby render contests unwinnable by outsiders. This happened in some. Calne, with sixty voters, witnessed six elections between 1705 and 1724 when Parliament, on petition, curtailed the franchise to just twenty-five. There was one further election in 1734, but then none until 1830.⁸ However, plenty of boroughs did continue to witness elections in the years after 1715 and these contests proved fertile stages for riot and disorder.
NOBS AND MOBS Edmund Burke noted in 1771, ‘There are two ways of raising mobs. One is by hiring, another by provoking.’⁹ Political historians have emphasized the former, for the hired mob played a significant role in elections in Hanoverian England. Indeed, in few contests did the participants not feel a need for their own tame ‘mob’, a group of men, sometimes armed with bludgeons, who were employed both to ‘escort’ the candidate’s supporters to and from the hustings and to intimidate the supporters of rivals. Such mobs might decisively swing elections. For example, in 1768 Lord Derby, who owned extensive estates around Preston, secured control of the borough, where the franchise was wide, from the corporation, in part at least by intimidating voters using large groups of miners from his pits.¹⁰ Other places saw mobs intervening on a still larger scale. In Chester, a large open borough in which Whig interests frequently clashed with entrenched Tory support in the corporation and in the surrounding county, disturbances occurred over the election of a mayor in 1732 after the Whigs had attempted to pack earlier elections to the corporation by bringing in a ‘swarm of excise, salt and customs house officers’ to swell their vote. Rumours that the Tory corporation intended to enfranchise some 300 new freemen overnight brought out a Whig mob who drove the aldermen from the town hall, which they then demolished. The following day the local Tories assembled ‘all their tenants to go to Chester, to beat the Whiggish rascals’. Some ‘8 or 9 hundred Welshmen . . . armed with clubs, staffs and other dangerous and offensive weapons, the servants of Mr Watkin Williams Wynn, in that gentleman’s livery, armed with pistols riding before them’, marched into the town. There Wynn, a noted Jacobite, and his supporters, ‘with their swords drawn . . . welcomed them with loud huzzas and acclamations’. They ‘knocked ⁸ Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 343. It was gradually bought up by the Earl of Shelburne so that by 1765 it was in effect a pocket borough. ⁹ Brickdale’s Parliamentary Diary, 5, 27 March 1771, cited in I. Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution (Pimlico, 1992), 1. ¹⁰ L. Namier and J. Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–90 (HMSO, 1964), 319.
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down every man that declared . . . for King George’. The Whigs eventually won the bitter contest but it was said that they had had to pay between £20 and £30 for their votes and their total bill came to £18,000.¹¹ The elections of 1734 were coloured by the aftermath of the Excise crisis and in many places saw violence. In Great Yarmouth there were extended riots, while in Harleston a procession of Whigs was stopped by a Tory mob. ‘The populace bereav’d them of their Coach Wheels, and having roll’d them about half a Mile out of Town, receiv’d a Crown apiece for bringing them back again.’¹² In Bridgnorth, another open borough with some 1,200 electors, the 1734 election was disrupted by a Tory mob who besieged the town hall and had to be dispersed with troops before the Whig candidate, Whitmore, could be elected. Again money ensured his triumph, since it was later said that ‘by dint of vast expense Whitmore commands this borough’. And in the borough of Chippenham the 1740 election was characterized by violence stimulated by the candidates. The Whigs, who had lost one of the seats in the previous election, now attempted to secure both, not only by enfranchising additional freemen but also, two days before election, bringing in ‘a considerable number of armed men . . . to terrify and intimidate the voters’. They even had the sheriff imprisoned on a trumped-up charge in Devizes gaol until the contest was over to ensure their methods prevailed.¹³ The use of the hired mob reflected the entirely instrumental attitude of rival candidates towards the process of election. This attitude was shared by many voters. In the more notoriously corrupt boroughs, where contests were frequent, voters positively welcomed elections since, as Cobbett found out, they regarded their votes as a property that could be realized only when contests took place, or were likely to take place.¹⁴ In such boroughs, elections were seen as a marketplace in which the ‘vendor’, the voter, might seek the best package for his vote, whether in the form of straight cash, the promise of a petty office, a contract, or a seat on a turnpike trust. At Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, a borough of which it was said that it had no trade except elections, the electors were renowned for their ‘baseness and perfidy’. In 1722 a three-way contest led to complaints by a defeated local landowner against a well-resourced outsider, who allegedly had paid some £700 to purchase his fifty-two votes: ‘most of the voters thus bribed were tenants of the petitioner and always voted in his interest, and that in general they declared they would have voted for the petitioner but for the sitting Member’s money.’¹⁵ At Camelford in Cornwall in 1759 votes cost around £12, though the price was deflated since the parliament had only two years left to run. By the early nineteenth century they were being sold for around £300.¹⁶ Non-electors too ¹¹ Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 203–4; Gentleman’ Magazine, iii (1733), 87. ¹² Cited in Langford, The Excise Crisis, 121. ¹³ House of Commons Journal, xxiv. 15–16; Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 310–11, 344. ¹⁴ Namier, Structure of Politics, 102–3. ¹⁵ Ibid. 309. ¹⁶ Ibid. 343. At £12, this was by any account a large sum to the voter, but for the purchasers it represented reasonably good value, given that there were only a couple of dozen voters in this constituency. However, the nominal purchase price of votes was not the sole expenditure a candidate
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welcomed and stood to benefit from elections. There would be plenty of ‘treats’ in the form of free drink and food both before and during the contest. The involvement of the wider populace in the electoral process, however, was not simply confined to the purchase of supporting mobs or alcohol to keep onlookers happy. The presence of the crowd was a necessary aspect of the essential theatricality that characterized Hanoverian politics. The whole process of out-ofdoors ritual and ceremony, used to mark great national events such as victories in wars, royal birthdays and anniversaries, electoral victories, and even demonstrations of political opposition such as the burning of effigies, all required ‘popular’ engagement.¹⁷ In the same way, the opportunity, before polling began, for members of the public to deliver a speech from the hustings, after the candidates had outlined their own merits, ‘maintained the illusion of popular participation and the tradition of unrestricted expression of opinion’.¹⁸ The crowd, therefore, formed a vital part of the legitimacy of the electoral process. While they could not vote, their presence sustained the notion that the parliamentary process was a ‘popular’ one. Had they not attended, the theatre of liberty would have lost its most symbolic constituent and been exposed as the closed market of influence that in reality it was. This need to maintain the illusion of openness did not make for a comfortable ride for the candidates. Indeed, elections were an opportunity for the populace to turn the world upside down, if only for a short period. Election culture required the competing candidates to make daily speeches and attend treats and displays during canvassing. They then had to deliver their major speech as the hustings opened. This provided an unusual opportunity for the crowd to heckle and subject the gentlemen to ribaldry and abuse for the prospective member was expected to show gallantry and good humour in his demeanour before the ‘mob’. This sometimes meant running the gauntlet of rotting vegetables, and worse, which might be thrown from below. This accepted right of the free-born Englishman to participate in elections in a full and frank manner could not easily be constrained. The process of polling was laboriously slow, with the credentials of each voter checked, not only by the polling clerk but also by the agents of the contesting parties who might seek to discredit the qualifications of known rival supporters. Thus, the agent managing the Lichfield seat for the Leveson-Gower interest in 1753–4 claimed expenses for: attending to Mr Anson, and upon Mr Leveson’s death and Mr Vernon being declared candidate renewing the same and for preparing and sending circular letters to the all might expect to have to make. Other forms of sweeteners pushed the price higher. Thus at Camelford in 1753 the ministry spent some £2,740, supplemented by other forms of patronage, to secure the unopposed return of its favoured candidates. Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–90, 227. ¹⁷ This role of the crowd in the wider theatre of Georgian politics is discussed in L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (Yale, 1992), 51–2, and N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 17–18, 24–32, 176–95. ¹⁸ O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, 130.
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the outvoters, preparing all the voters and copies, drawing and copying various notices to the officers of the place, for producing books etc twice canvassing the town, attending the whole poll, which lasted six days and defend our own and object to their votes being wholly engaged therein from the beginning of October to December.¹⁹
Dispute was intrinsic to the process, which frequently degenerated into vulgar brawling. Although the candidates would not remain at the hustings all the time—elections often took many days to complete—they were still, unhappily for them, too often near to outbreaks of fisticuffs. For the fortunate victor, he could look forward to making his acceptance speech to an inebriated crowd and then being ‘chaired’ around his constituency. In county elections the chair would be highly decorated and the new MP escorted by a guard on horseback. In the boroughs, the member might well have to ride a crude sedan chair borne insecurely aloft by plebeian supporters well the worse for drink. Elections were no place for the squeamish.²⁰ The character of electioneering could easily resemble a bear garden. However, we should not assume that the ‘mob’ lacked political awareness. If they lacked that ‘sophisticated’ understanding of faction and interest that students of Sir Lewis Namier deem essential for interpreting Hanoverian politics, they had a clear, if limited, perception of the proclaimed values of ‘Whiggery’ or ‘Toryism’, since the political elite felt the need constantly to promulgate them. Alongside the firework displays, the bands of music, and the ringing of church bells, the symbols of political allegiance were prominently displayed in forms that made them accessible to all sections of society. Wearing favours, buttons, or oak leaves were part of the popular participation in the theatre of politics, but they also indicated political awareness. Rudé, Dickinson, and, more recently, Nicholas Rogers have shown that the political crowd in the early eighteenth-century cities held firm and determined political values which were not merely ciphers of those promulgated by their social superiors.²¹ The same was true, if demonstrated in more muted form, in provincial urban England. While self-interest was strong, elections were also about civic betterment and independence. The Devonshire borough of Tiverton provides an example of how a strong sense of political rights might inform popular attitudes. A prosperous sergemaking town at the start of the century, its woollen manufacturers were strongly organized in guilds, or ‘societies’, which remained a force, economically and politically, until after mid-century. In 1724, following disorders in earlier elections, a new charter severely limited the right of election to members of the corporation. The eighteenth-century historian of the town noted that ‘Scarce an election has since taken place, but some degree of resentment have been expressed ¹⁹ Staffordshire RO, D593/F/3/12/4/4, Thomas Gilbert to Gower, 28 December 1754. ²⁰ A detailed account of the processes of election can be found in O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, ch. 3. ²¹ In particular see the excellent discussion in N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities, ch. 10, especially 362–7.
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against the memories of those men who had employed much low cunning to monopolise the right of election and deprive their fellow citizens of such important privileges.’ This was clearly shown in the election of 1754 when the various trade societies assembled daily at their club-houses, to consult upon the best means of promoting their end and design; and at night frequently beat brass pans, as signals for meeting together in larger bodies to strike terror into the minds of the corporation or any other person what might attempt to oppose their claim of electing the members of parliament.
Troops were brought to the town to enforce order, but the woollen workers were unabashed. On 17 April, hearing that the election was about to be held, a large crowd assembled, intent upon preventing polling. The societies, their colours flying, marched to the mayor’s house where, to the accompaniment of ‘several loud huzzas’, they presented a paper setting out their claims ‘and delivered their opinion very freely respecting the election’. They then marched through the town to the inn where the dragoons were billeted, passing ‘with loud huzzas and colours flying, very orderly’. Realizing that the election was not going to take place after all, the crowd converged on the church and cattle yard to drink the hogsheads of cider they had provided for their exertions. The justices, having earlier stayed out of the way, now determined to use the soldiers to disperse the crowd and read the Riot Act. The woollen workers were not to be goaded into disorder and instead again set off to parade the town, now carrying a large silk flag commemorating on one side the victor of Culloden and on the other George II, clearly symbolizing their ‘loyalty’. The justices, abashed, retreated, to huzzas and hand-clapping. However, when some dragoons tried to take prisoners, violence erupted. Soon troopers were riding up and down the streets, hacking at the demonstrators. Their commander was clearly spoiling for a fight: ‘Give me leave, Sir, to order the men to fire and you shall see the fellows hop like peas.’ His ardour did not last long. In the mêlée which followed, he was set upon by some women who stole his sword, a humiliation that he did not live down. But that was not the end of his disgrace. An attorney later served writs on both him and the mayor for the injuries sustained by the victims of these military assaults. It was said that the sitting MP, Sir William Yonge, paid ‘very considerable sums to deliver the Justice and his associates’.²² Independence might also be manifested in favour of those candidates who could best benefit the constituency. Prospective candidates might be expected to demonstrate an ability to invest in the economic fortunes of the borough, either directly or by providing the contacts that would ensure civic prosperity. Sitting members who had proved themselves less than forthcoming with their largesse in the intervening parliament might find themselves in ²² M. Dunsford, Historical Memoirs of the Town and Parish of Tiverton in the County of Devon (Exeter, 1790), 238–42.
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electoral difficulties.²³ The borough of Tiverton again provides an example. In 1764 the death of the leading merchant in the town, Oliver Peard, threw the town into disorder. Peard was a leading Whig who had been rewarded for his political services by his appointment as the Receiver of Land Tax for Devon. The post enabled him to extend his political control by allowing clothiers on the corporation to run up arrears on their tax payments, thereby effectively ensuring their political compliance. His death ‘occasioned not only a present general stagnation of business, but great fears among the labourers that the trade itself would be removed elsewhere’. They therefore pressed Charles Baring, a wealthy merchant and banker from Exeter, to move his business to the town to take over Beard’s interest, something he was keen to do. At first the corporation seemed to welcome Baring and the woollen workers ‘made a grand procession, with the colours of their several societies, about the town’. However, Baring wanted to take over not one but three vacancies on the corporation, in effect gaining control and thereby enabling him to take over Peard’s Receivership and his key parliamentary influence. While the smaller clothiers saw this as a price worth paying to revive trade, the larger merchants of the town were hostile, fearing they would soon be ‘in as absolute a state of dependence as that from which they had lately been freed’. The prospective loss of Baring’s trade angered the woollen workers. On 12 June 1765, they ‘assembled in a large body’ and followed the mayor through the streets to the Angel Inn, pressing him to agree to vote for Baring. After some time, several of them, chiefly women, broke into the house, through the windows, and into the room where the mayor was, and greatly insulted him, pulling off his wig, striking him, twisting his nose, and threatening to kill him, if he did not immediately sign a paper . . . to vote for Mr Baring and to call a hall within eight days, in order to elect him.
He signed. Other members of the corporation were similarly ‘lobbied’, with similar outcomes. Master combers and weavers warned that they would never again trade with anyone who did not support Baring’s candidature, while the various societies warned they would fine members who broke the injunction against working for his opponents.²⁴ However, on the evening before the election, the mayor reneged on his agreement, wrote to the War Office demanding military assistance, and then promptly decamped from the town. Next day the news that the election would ²³ For example, at Cambridge, where there were some 200–300 voters, the sitting member, a Tory, was displaced by a Whig despite the known political affiliation of the leading voters: ‘the aldermen, though almost all of them were Tories in their hearts, wanted their members to be more free with their money among them than they found Sir John Cotton was, who they gave out, never traded with them for the necessaries of his house . . . but sent to London or anywhere else where he could purchase the cheapest.’ Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 201. ²⁴ It was said that they would not even allow their workmen to sell their urine to those opposing Baring, urine being used extensively in the trade to scour cloths after fulling. The cry, ‘Baring for ever. No piss for Webber’ (the mayor), must constitute one of the more novel election slogans of the era.
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not be held brought large numbers onto the streets. While there now seemed sufficient votes for Baring, without the mayor no election could take place. The crowd quartered the town, searching for him, and then marched out to his house in the neighbouring village of Bolham. He was not there either, so they contented themselves with doing extensive damage. All his windows were smashed, the doors forced, and many of his household goods ‘demolished’. They additionally destroyed his garden, five cloth racks, and a large weir that provided the water to power the mayor’s fulling mill. The arrival of a large body of infantry shifted the balance of power within the town and the mayor now found it sufficiently safe to emerge from hiding. A new election date was fixed for 1 July but by then voters had changed sides, mainly because a new Exeter merchant, John Duntze, had emerged as a possible patron. He was closely connected to Nathaniel Ryder, one of the sitting members. He was elected, along with two leading town merchants, to fill the corporation vacancies. The waiting crowd were incensed at this outcome and attacked the town hall and the corporation members with stones. Troops now started taking up those engaged in the earlier disorders but when they attempted to remove the prisoners to the county gaol, determined attempts were made to free them. The villages around were warned and at Silverton the constables, escorting some prisoners, were ‘beaten, wounded and forced to remain in the street, in great danger of their lives, during the night’. Soldiers managed to convey some other prisoners away only by making their way across fields in the darkness. However, the power of the law ultimately overwhelmed the protestors. Although the sentences handed down on the prisoners were relatively light, in view of the damage done, continuing warrants issued for riot kept many families ‘in painful suspense a long time. These warrants depressed the spirits of the labourers in the woollen manufacture in Tiverton; and taught them so much of the laws that there hath scarcely happened any instance of any violent outrage in or about the town since.’ Duntze did not himself take on the Receivership, which went to an ex-army man. But between them, Duntze and Ryder effectively sewed up the political representation of the borough thereafter, with Duntze himself entering Parliament in 1768 alongside his ally. The combination of Ryder’s money and Duntze’s extensive trade undermined further political protest.²⁵ Popular awareness of the divisions of national politics and the micropolitics of the borough meant that it was often not necessary to ‘hire’ the mob. Popular intervention in the political process might equally result from ‘provocation’. The politics of the Chester mob noted above might have been parochial, but they were well aware of the intentions of the Whigs to take control of the borough in support of a ministry that had attempted, if unsuccessfully, to introduce the Excise bill and that had systematically sought to undermine liberties. A good ²⁵ London Gazette, 29 June 1765; Dunsford, Historical Memoirs of the Town and Parish of Tiverton, 245–52; Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–90, i. 28–9.
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example of political mobs reflecting both a ‘hired’ and a wider ‘provoked’ political character can be seen by looking at the small cathedral city of Lichfield in Staffordshire, where deep political conflict into the middle of the century revealed, for the state, a worrying persistence of hostility not only to the Whig oligarchy but also to the Hanoverian monarchy. Early Hanoverian Staffordshire was strongly Tory. Both county seats were held, without election, by Tories from 1715 till 1747, with the Leveson-Gowers of Trentham occupying one almost as right. In the boroughs, Tory candidates put up a strong showing against Whigs, though, with no borough strong enough to resist local landed patrons, conflicts often tended to reflect local power struggles. At Stafford there was continuing resistance to the money and influence of the Whiggish Chetwynds, who had won both seats in 1715. At the 1722 elections they were ousted in a violent struggle in which the mob attacked Chetwynd’s house but the family held one of the seats in the next two elections and took both in 1741 without a contest. When in 1747 there was no opposition to the Chetwynds, the crowd made clear their displeasure and ‘broke into, defaced and demolished Mr William Chetwynd’s house at Stafford on the election day’.²⁶ The general unity of the Staffordshire landed ranks in the Tory cause, however, was shattered in the early 1740s. The Leveson-Gowers had joined the Tory ranks from the Whigs in 1710 and had duly been rewarded by Queen Anne with a title. However, by 1740 the family were finding the Whigs much more agreeable, partly in consequence of dynastic marriage into the Bedford family, who were strongly Whig, and no doubt also because of the opportunities for preferment that an alliance with the ruling Whig factions would make possible. In 1742, Gower jumped ship and joined the ministry. Two years later he raised a regiment in support of the government, a timely move given the Jacobite invasion that shortly followed. He was further ennobled for his efforts. Gower clearly did not consider that this political volte-face might in any way undermine his position as the sitting MP for the county. And indeed, when a general election was announced in 1747, he assumed that he would retain the seat. He proved correct. The irate Tory gentry of the county put up a ferocious electoral challenge, to no avail. Trentham had long controlled elections to the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme and, predictably, in 1747 the Newcastle electors duly followed their ‘patron’ into the Whig camp. However, Gower, keen to widen his power base, had also determined to take control of the borough of Lichfield, a move that aroused not merely gentry ire but also significant popular protest. The right of election in the borough lay in a range of qualifications that included not only a core of burgage tenure voters but also some 40s. freeholders and those freemen living in the city who paid scot and lot. Disturbances had characterized its many elections. In 1718 the Whigs complained that they ²⁶ J. C. Wedgwood, Staffordshire Parliamentary History, ii. part 2: 1715–1832 (William Salt Archaeological Society, London 1922), 252, citing Morning Advertiser, n.d.
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had been ‘kept out of the Hall and barbarously beaten and abused, and their lives endangered by a great mob with papers in their hats resembling white roses’. The white rose was the emblem of the Pretender. Four years later the Whigs won both seats amid suspicions that the returning officer, ‘who was always thought a Tory and an honest man, has been bought’. The Whigs likewise won in 1727 when the Tories claimed to have ‘had a visible majority of the legal voters on the day of election’ but the Whigs brought a great number of colliers and other riotous persons into the City who, joined with the mob, obstructed the petitioners’ voters; and the sheriff . . . encouraged the said mob; so that when the petitioners had polled about 70 persons, their voters were obliged to depart, finding it impossible to obtain any justice there.
Thereafter the seat reverted to its Tory roots until 1747.²⁷ Gower had maintained a distant ‘interest’ in the borough, and had ‘recommended’ various Tory candidates for one of the two seats.²⁸ In advance of the 1747 election, Gower formed an alliance to take over the borough’s representation with Thomas Anson of Shugborough, whose family fortunes had been transformed by his younger brother George’s capture of a Spanish treasure galleon on an otherwise disastrous circumnavigation of the globe in 1740–4.²⁹ George Anson, put into Parliament for a nomination borough, chose his friends carefully, and was soon a member of the ‘Bloomsbury gang’, a group of prominent Whigs centred around the Duke of Bedford, through whose good offices he was elevated to the Admiralty. Some of his loot was put out to buy up freeholds in the city, which were then split into small plots that qualified for ‘faggot votes’. These were handed out to tame supporters, evidence of their supposed ‘wealth’ being provided by 40s. ‘annuities’ nominally claimable on the Ansons’ Shugborough estate. It proved an effective way of packing the vote. As an early historian of the county noted, ‘The more sham votes were created, the more the populace of the city became violent in its opposition.’ Gower and Anson portrayed their candidacies as being in the patriotic interest: Another more his cause to press Crows on his brother’s great success And thinks his name alone will sway Their votes and carry all away. The last boasts native patriot pow’r And glories in the name of G——r. ²⁷ Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 319–20; Wedgwood, Staffordshire Parliamentary History, pp. xxv-vi; Journal of the House of Commons, xxi. 46. ²⁸ For example, in 1733 he recommended Sir Rowland Hill. Staffordshire RO, D661/10/1/1/1, Gower to Dyott, 5 June 1733. ²⁹ Anson started off his voyage with eight ships and over 1,900 crew and marines. He returned with only 188 of his original complement and one ship, but with some £243,000 taken from the Covadonga, ‘the prize of all the oceans’. G. Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans (Harper Collins, 1999), 201, 218.
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The local Tories were impressed on neither score and the campaign was both bitter and protracted. Rioting broke out before a poll was declared and the election contest itself witnessed continuous disturbances until, as the Morning Advertiser reported, the Whig interest ‘was at last defeated and drove out of town with much bloodshed on both sides’. However, when the votes were finally counted, the Whigs proved to be the winners.³⁰ The cost to Anson and Gower was said to have been £20,000, but this was little consolation for the ‘free’ electors whose votes had now been rendered worthless by the Whig purchases of freeholds.³¹ Defeat was bitter and, when, later in the summer, the Lichfield races were run, more violence flared, focused directly at the borough’s new masters. The Whigs had determined to make a show at the event, with the Ansons and LevesonGowers feting a visit from the Duke of Bedford: And thus a motley Train appears Of feather’d Fops and rough Jack Tars Of all his G—— cou’d summon thither To please his L–dy’s good old Father.
The Tory gentry determined to spoil their fun and, in the guise of a ‘Blue Coat Hunt’, Rode on in Numbers to the Course And drove the C–urt—rs thence by Force
The Duke ‘received a horse whipping from a Country Farmer’ and the Whigs made a precipitate withdrawal from the field. The farmers and gentry who led the disorders were in no way coy about their politics, dressing in plaid as evidence of their Jacobite sympathies. Victors on the racecourse, the Tory mob now took possession of the town. Anson’s agent reported that, headed by some Staffordshire gentry, ‘about one hundred and fifty of the Burton Mobb, most of ’em in Plaid Wastcoats, Plaid Ribbons round their Hatts, and some with white Cockades enter’d the Town in a body’ and were later joined by ‘another Party of the Birmingham people, most of ’em in the same dress’, accompanied by leading Warwickshire gentry. The Whigs kept a low profile and the only victim was a soldier who cried out ‘God bless his majesty King George. Damn your Plaids’ and had his arm broken. ‘Many of this Mobb drank the Pretender’s Health publickly on the streets, singing treasonable songs’, but the demonstration broke up without further violence.³² This clear evidence of Jacobitism so soon after the abortive ‘’45’ was a shock to government, and Paul Monod suggests that ‘only the timorousness of the Tory ³⁰ Wedgwood, Staffordshire Parliamentary History, pp. xxvi–xxvii, 252–3; The Litchfield Squabble (London, 1747), 10; Morning Advertiser, 26 June 1747; Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 359. Leveson-Gower secured 278 votes, Anson 272, and the sitting members 237 and 229 votes. ³¹ Wedgwood, Staffordshire Parliamentary History, 267–8. ³² The Litchfield Squabble, 24, 27; Thomas Hinton to Lord Anson, 26 September 1747, cited in Wedgwood, Staffordshire Parliamentary History, 253–4.
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baronets prevented the demonstration from becoming a general uprising.’³³ Certainly militant Toryism meshed with Jacobitism in the West Midlands in a particularly heady brew. In Walsall in May 1750 on ‘Restoration Day’, a crowd numbering around three hundred, mostly buckle makers, assembled carrying ‘an Image or Figure’ and hung it from a gibbet. The effigy wore ‘an old Wigg on that part representing his head and there appeared to be a Cow Tail or Horse Tail hanging from the Hinder part of the Wigg and a bunch of turnips was under one arm and an Orange in the hand.’ In case these symbols failed to elucidate its identity, the effigy also carried a paper stating it was George II. It was then used for target practice. The crowd would not disperse and minor disturbances continued for a week, including the singing of Jacobite songs.³⁴ There were further disturbances of a more serious nature later in June until a heavy military presence put a stop to them. The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that ‘a great insurrection in Birmingham’ had led to clashes between dragoons and rioters with several soldiers killed.³⁵ The government was particularly worried by a curious short-lived organization called the Bowling Green Club formed at Uttoxeter and an even more curious meeting, known as ‘the jubilee’, at the Staffordshire village of Hamstall Ridware, which may have been part of an organized Jacobite conspiracy for a rising.³⁶ It is unlikely that any close connection existed between Jacobite gentlemen and Jacobite craftsmen—buckle makers, one fancies, would not have been welcome among those gentry groups that toasted a return of ‘the King over the water’—but these events demonstrate the widespread dislike, verging on hatred, for the local Whig oligarchy and the common ground that enabled the gentry to ‘provoke’ mobs without need of ‘hiring’. Lichfield continued to display strong anti-Whig feelings and, in the 1753 by-election, following the death of Gower, the Tory candidate, Sir Thos Gresley Bart. entered the City attended by upwards of 200 gentlemen and 500 freemen. The ribbons worn on this occasion were blue and white, with the Mottoes of ‘No Jews’, ‘No Venality and Corruption’, ‘Christianity and the English Constitution for Ever’.³⁷
Gresley secured a remarkable victory over the Leveson-Gower nominee, thanks mainly to the partiality of the sheriff. However, the Whigs had the result overturned on petition. The independents continued to force elections, in 1754 and 1755, while Anson and his friends continued to buy up burgages. By December 1754 their agent could announce, ‘I see your interest now in such a view that with a tolerable degree of management for the future no opposition can ³³ P. K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), 199. ³⁴ Gentleman’s Magazine, xx (1750), 378; Staffordshire RO, D 1287/22/5, Examination of Robert Turner, 3 June 1750. ³⁵ Gentleman’s Magazine, xx (1750), 331: the rioters were accused of having ‘set up the effigies of certain great personages, shot at them and then cut off their heads and burnt their bodies’. ³⁶ Ibid. 343; Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 207–8. ³⁷ Reads Weekly Journal, 24 November 1753.
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hurt you or put you to much expense.’³⁸ The independent electors, ‘swamped with faggot votes, took up an attitude of surly truculence towards their Members. In November 1756 they sent, not an Address, but Instructions’, criticizing the ‘misapplication of Supplies’, the loss of Minorca, ‘the brightest jewel in the English Crown’, and demanding, among other things, the re-enactment of the Triennial Act. Its tone reflected the continuing deep anger at the way in which Whig money had taken over their political representation.³⁹ Election riots in other boroughs likewise revealed the same mixture of hired mobs and ‘provoked’ civic political sentiment. At Coventry, where a large electorate provided for rumbustious local politics, the Whiggish corporation fought a rearguard against independent freeman and outside Tory interests. Intimidation and managed mobs combined with political slogans, as when in 1722 the Tories tried to return their men using violence: sticks and clubs were provided from Warwick and elsewhere and whole horse loads of them were brought into Coventry before the election where many persons were armed . . . Lord Craven and his friends marched into the city at the head of 2000 men, horse and foot, with green twigs and leaves in their hats, armed, colours flying, drums beating and trumpets sounding. They began rioting, smashed many windows, stayed those that had no colours and cried ‘Down with the Rump! Down with the King’s Head! No Hanoverians! No seven years Parliament!’⁴⁰
That election was declared void but later contests saw similar levels of disorder. In 1780 corporation candidates complained that ‘the freemen in our interest (a few excepted) were forcibly kept back from the booth; many of them stripped naked and their clothes torn to pieces by a mob of colliers hired for that purpose; others cruelly beaten and most shamefully treated.’ Their opponents counter-claimed that the sheriffs were partial in their scrutiny of franchises. There were constant riots around the polling booths and after eight days only ninety-seven men had been polled and the election abandoned. After a second contest, the corporation were pronounced victors, but the result was appealed and their opponents awarded the seat.⁴¹ In the West Country, at Taunton, where dissenters formed a large part of the electorate, the corporation interest sided with the Whigs. In 1754, a by-election saw a forceful attempt by local Tory gentry to wrest the seat away and led to ‘one of the severest contests that ever disturbed a town’. The preliminaries lasted some six months: ‘The houses of entertainment were kept open during all this time; by which a vast expense was incurred.’ In the election itself an extraordinary total of 700 votes—there were only around 500 voters—were ³⁸ Staffordshire RO, D593/F/3/12/3/1, volume of observations on the poll, 12–13; F/3/12/4/4, Thomas Gilbert to Lord, 25 December 1754. ³⁹ Wedgwood, Staffordshire Parliamentary History, 267–8. ⁴⁰ Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–54, i. 340–1. ⁴¹ The Case of the Controverted Election of Coventry, reported by John Philipps, Barrister (London, 1784), 38–40, 60–3; Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–90, i. 401–2. Interestingly, there was some unanimity in 1734 when a large majority threw out a sitting member who had supported the Excise bill.
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rejected by the scrutineers. The ministry, anxious to win, used £3,675 from secret service funds. When the ‘court’ candidate eventually triumphed, riots broke out, which resulted in two killed and many injured. It was later said that the trade of the town suffered for years thereafter owing to the ‘dissipation’ of this election.⁴² These examples indicate that ‘provocation’ played every bit as great a role in political riots as did ‘hiring’. Such provocation might arise from ‘local’ or ‘national’ issues. But if specific provocations varied, the response they elicited was informed by a shared belief in an English heritage of ‘liberty’. This concept, that the Englishman possessed certain inviolable liberties, remained deeply entrenched in the rhetoric and symbolism of political discourse throughout the eighteenth century across all classes. ‘Liberty’ informed the protesting citizens of Tiverton, Coventry, and Taunton. It informed the ‘free’ voters of Lichfield. And it even informed the views of the highly venal voters of Honiton, whose ‘blessing’ represented the ‘liberty’ of the town to select an MP who would benefit the interests of the town. The Whigs in particular claimed to be the guardians of this history of liberty, even as they steadily cemented their own oligarchic rule. Yet, although for the first forty years of Hanoverian rule increasing scepticism greeted their constant reiteration of the rhetoric of liberty, the Tories were unable to construct an alternative narrative of equal power because they remained too easily tainted with the counter-charge of Jacobitism. However, as the supposed threat from the Jacobites receded after 1745, the disparity between Whig rhetoric and Whig action became more glaringly obvious. As the parliamentary system became ever more narrow in its representation and limited in its accountability, the potential for rupture increased. When this happened, the result was to have repercussions that seemed to threaten the very foundations of the political system. The catalyst for this challenge was a dissolute Whig MP for the ‘squalid and venal’ constituency of Aylesbury,⁴³ John Wilkes.
‘ WILKES AND LIBERT Y ’⁴⁴ John Wilkes, publisher, brilliant self-publicist, and politician, managed in the years from 1763 to 1771 to redefine the relationship between the patrician politicians and the plebs. A supporter of the ‘City Patriots’ faction in Westminster led by Pitt and Bedford, Wilkes shot to notoriety with his journal The North Briton, its title a ⁴² J. Toulmin, The History of the Town of Taunton (Taunton, 1791), 84; Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–90, i. 10, 372. ⁴³ Namier and Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–90, 215. ⁴⁴ The ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ episode has been thoroughly researched by many historians. The best specific account remains G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1962). It should be read in tandem with J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976) and Nicholas Roger’s series of brilliant investigations into the political crowd in Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain. The following paragraphs draw heavily on them.
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deliberate insult to the new Prime Minister, Lord Bute, whose promotion was widely ascribed to George III’s desire to stamp a new royal authority upon the Commons. Bute was widely hated and generally despised and the North Briton proved a most effective propagandist against his ministry. However, in its notorious forty-fifth edition, Wilkes denounced those passages in the King’s speech from the throne opening Parliament that praised the Paris peace agreement of 1763, a peace many saw as dishonourable. The government chose to interpret this as a direct attack upon the sovereign, even though all knew that the speech was merely enunciating ministry policy. The authors and printers of the North Briton were rounded up on a general warrant and thrown into the Tower, charged with seditious libel. The use of general warrants, warrants issued directly by the Secretary of State that did not name the accused, leaving it up to the authorities to select prisoners, had long been an affront to vaunted civil liberties and Wilkes chose to confront the issue head on. He demanded a hearing under habeas corpus before a sympathetic judge and successfully had the general warrant declared illegal. He and his fellows were freed to widespread celebrations that hailed ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. Riotous crowds ceremonially burned jackboots and petticoats, symbols respectively of Bute and the Princess Dowager, who, it was rumoured, was Bute’s lover. When the printers, alleging trespass and illegal arrest, won their case for damages against the Secretary of State’s office, this was the icing on the cake. Wilkes had managed, by his astute use of publicity and quickness in recognizing a popular cause, to focus widespread, if diffuse, opposition towards the government into a clear issue. Distrust of the Whig ascendancy in Westminster and popular hostility to the new King were deep-rooted in London and there was a strong groundswell of enthusiasm for those who were prepared to stand up against them. The ministry, stung by such displays and determined to cut Wilkes down to size, struck back. The Commons determined that the privileges of membership of the House did not extend to libel and voted that No. 45 was a ‘false, scandalous and seditious libel’. The Cabinet and the Lords further demanded that he be prosecuted for blasphemy for publishing a pornographic parody on Pope’s Essay on Man, entitled an Essay on Women, found among his papers when they had been seized. It was clear that the government intended to use the law courts to make an example of him so, before his trial, Wilkes decamped to France. He was convicted in absentia of libel and blasphemy, expelled from the Commons, and declared an outlaw. Wilkes might have stayed in France. But, as his money dwindled, homesick, he determined to take up the cudgels once more. With typical bravado, he resolved to return to challenge the government by standing in the general election of 1768. He first turned up at the hustings for the City of London. He came bottom of the poll but immediately stood for the county seat of Middlesex. The character of Middlesex politics was unlike that of most county seats. Dominated by London whose growing urban sprawl increasingly engulfed it, the
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freeholder electorate was overwhelmingly dominated by those with a business connection, not only the haute bourgeois merchants and manufacturers, professional men and brewers, but also what were termed ‘the little freeholders’, tradesmen, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. Unlike the country freeholders, they might not easily be dominated or coerced into voting as they were told. It was to this sort of constituent that Wilkes specifically directed his appeal. His timing was also excellent. Since his flight, the government had presided over a catalogue of catastrophes: the growing truculence of the American colonists had been exacerbated by inept handling of the problem of finding a means of funding the colonies’ defence; ministries had fallen to be replaced by weaker ones; Pitt, the one-time champion of popular causes, had accepted a peerage, removing the one figure of public respect from the scene; and the economy, disrupted by American disorder and bad harvests, was collapsing, with unemployment hitting hardest in London, which was full of discharged soldiers, sailors, and Irish immigrants. It proved an explosive mixture. Wilkes stood on an essentially negative platform of opposition to the ministry, his early addresses simply reminding the voters of his former battles and urging vigilance against abuse of power by the government. It was only later when others began to shape his agitation that ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ took on a reforming cast with demands for shorter parliaments, for measures to cut down on sinecures, and for a more equal representation, in other words franchise reform. But Wilkes excelled at turning the hustings into a theatre in which he played the starring role of anti-hero. The poll was conducted with little disorder but Wilkes’ victory, topping the poll with 44 per cent of all votes cast, was followed by jubilant celebrations that swept across London to the cry ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. The ‘rabble were very tumultuous; some persons, who had voted in favour of Mr Wilkes, having put out lights, the mob paraded the whole town from east to west, obliging every body to illuminate and breaking the windows of such as did not do it immediately.’⁴⁵ Benjamin Franklin recorded that even the small cross streets, lanes, courts and other out-of-the-way places were all in a blaze with lights, and the principal streets all night long, as the mob went round again after two o’clock and obliged people who had extinguished their candles to light them again.
He had travelled to Winchester in the wake of the election and ‘for fifteen miles out of town, there was scarcely a door or window shutter next the road’ which did not bear the mark of ‘45’.⁴⁶ This was no hired mob but a genuine explosion of popular support.
⁴⁵ Annual Register, 1768, 85–6. Wilkes secured 1,292 votes as against 827 for Cooke and 807 for Proctor, the ministerial candidate. ⁴⁶ Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin, 16 April 1768, in W. B. Wilcox (ed.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press, 1972), xv. 98–9.
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The spring and early summer saw the government’s situation worsen. Wilkes surrendered to the authorities fresh from his triumph and was sentenced to twenty-two months in gaol, but a large meeting outside his prison in St George’s Fields turned into a ‘massacre’ when the detested Scots Guards fired on the noisy crowd of Wilkes’ supporters, killing or wounding over twenty.⁴⁷ Paralleling the political disturbances, industrial riots erupted across London: disputes among coal heavers and sailors grew violent, while tailors struck work and silk weavers broke looms. Franklin recorded ‘a daily scene of lawless riot and confusion. Mobs are patrolling the streets at noon day, some knocking all down that will not roar for Wilkes and Liberty.’⁴⁸ A by-election in Middlesex, necessitated by the death of Wilkes’ fellow member, saw the victory of his lieutenant, Glynne, in the face of massive ministerial pressure, liberal purchases of drink, and a brutal hired mob whose violence led to the deaths of a Wilkite lawyer and a constable.⁴⁹ Across the country Wilkes’ stance in the face of ministerial ‘despotism’ was rousing radicals and gentlemen into action: county meetings were called and a Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights, which gave structure to a developing gentlemanly radicalism, formed.⁵⁰ In February 1769, Wilkes, from gaol, appealed against his expulsion from the House. It was rejected but within a fortnight a new poll had re-elected him. A second appeal in March followed with identical results.⁵¹ Parliament’s refusal to accept an elected Member struck at the very basis of representative politics. As Wilkes claimed, ‘The question is, whether the people have an inherent right to be represented in Parliament by the man of their free choice.’⁵² While the Commons, coerced by the ministry, might legitimately make a case against accepting an imprisoned criminal as a Member, constitutional justification was cut from under its own feet in March when, in a third attempt to defeat Wilkes at the polls, the ministry put up Colonel Luttrell. He too was comprehensively defeated, but nonetheless declared the new member.⁵³ Here clearly was a total contempt for the rights of electors. Luttrell’s presence in the House showed more clearly than any speech the weakness of the vaunted Constitution and stimulated deepening demands for reform from across the country. Wilkes had been well served by the London crowd. Indeed, they formed a vital, even essential element of the whole Wilkite movement, in 1763, in the ⁴⁷ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxviii (1768), 242–3, 323–5, 346. ⁴⁸ Franklin to Ross, 14 May 1768, in Wilcox (ed.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, xv. 129. On the industrial disputes, see above, pp. 134–5, 144–5. ⁴⁹ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxviii (1768), 583. ⁵⁰ Brewer, Party Ideology, 178–9 notes that celebrations of Wilkes’ birthday and demonstrations in his support took place widely across the provinces in late 1768 and in the following year. Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxviii (1768), 241. ‘An Independent Yeoman’ urged readers to remember ‘that the choice of representative depends on the free voice of the people and not the will and dictate of any power ever so opulent or presuming.’ London General Evening Post, 5379, 2–5 April 1768. ⁵¹ Annual Register (1768), 82. ⁵² Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxix (1769) 183. ⁵³ Annual Register (1769), 90.
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contests of 1768, and in the struggles that followed.⁵⁴ While it was the Middlesex freeholders who gave Wilkes his trump card, membership of the Commons, and the City freemen who later were to elect him sheriff and mayor, it was the crowd that legitimated his claim to represent ‘liberty’. Their unstinting support sustained the middling sort in his cause in the face of heavy ministerial pressure. Huge crowds assembled for every election and at the many Wilkite meetings. It was they who took the news of Wilkes’ success far into the city and, thereby into newspapers across the country. They made Wilkes ‘news’. Yet Wilkes, though revelling in this plebeian adulation, had but little time for the ‘mob’. The crowd were, for him, part of a theatre of political remonstrance, a Greek chorus that provided noise and excitement and sometimes symbolic punishment of his opponents, but they were not expected to intervene in the substance of the play. Wilkes and his supporters might hope to overthrow a ministry but their model was that of parliamentary coup, not popular revolution. If the Wilkites were exploitative in their invocation and use of the ‘mob’, the Wilkite crowds appeared perfectly ready to play their assigned role. For most the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ episode was more an extended version of older electoral politics than a major step in the development of a popular political consciousness. That does not mean that the crowd lacked political understanding or sophistication. The Middlesex elections stimulated artisan radical debating clubs and societies and saw the advancement of ideas of universal suffrage. The ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ crowds of 1763 and 1768 were in no way ‘hired’ mobs: they were ‘provoked’ only in the sense that they saw in Wilkes an anti-hero able and willing to worst the entrenched power of a ministry even more unpopular than usual. Wilkes’ key appeal to them lay not in his fairly perfunctory liberal ideas but in his open defiance of an over-weening state and its hated leaders. Crowds cried ‘liberty’ because they believed that it was as much their liberties as those of Wilkes, or of the printers of the North Briton, or of the electors of Middlesex, which were being subverted. The same was true when the cry of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ was extended into industrial disputes, as when the coal-heavers marched around to the battle cry of ‘Wilkes and coal-heavers for ever!’ Clearly, as historians have agreed, there was little linking the question of the rights of elected MPs and county electors to the issue of wages, in this or any other dispute. But the crowd were not only using their hero’s name to drum up support. Their slogan reflected a deeper awareness that the economic problems that confronted the capital’s economy were in large degree the product of the mismanagement of a government whose indifference to the suffering of its lowlier citizens was demonstrated at every turn. It also demonstrated that threats by the oligarchy to the liberties of the free-born Englishman would be resisted. ⁵⁴ Brewer, Party Ideology, 166, notes the way in which Wilkes maintained interest in his campaigns through assiduous use of the press: ‘He quickly defined not only the terms of the dispute but the context of debate, one in which the public was perforce to be involved.’
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If Wilkes was able to invoke ‘liberty’ to ‘provoke’ the mob in 1763 and 1768 in the cause of resisting despotic government and securing electors’ rights, ‘liberty’ might also be invoked in more reactionary ways. As noted earlier, a key factor underpinning the rights of the free-born Englishman was freedom from the tyranny of Catholicism. Provoking the ‘mob’ to resist alleged Catholic attacks on Protestantism proved an easy matter in the eighteenth century, as the Sacheverell riots⁵⁶ of Anne’s reign had demonstrated only too clearly. Catholics, because of their religion, could easily be presented as enemies of the state and therefore as threats to the liberty of the subject, as Colin Haydon has shown.⁵⁷ Although other religious groups—Dissenters, Methodists, and Quakers—were also subject to periodic harassment, as essentially Protestant sects the threat they might supposedly pose to the Constitution was less obvious, though their patriotism was clearly suspect, as evidenced by their refusal to conform to the authority of the national church. Catholicism, an alien religion of slavery and absolute monarchy and the ideological underpinning of the country’s most implacable foreign enemy, posed a fundamental challenge to liberty and to the state and roused passions across the social classes. For the most part, such passions were easily assuaged in small-scale disturbances and in symbolic demonstrations. However, the mixture of patriotism and militant Protestantism always constituted a potentially dangerous brew when ‘provoking’ mobs, a fact only too vividly displayed in 1780 with the Gordon riots. The trigger to the most destructive disturbances to affect London or any other English city in the eighteenth century came from moves to offer some relief from the constraints placed upon Catholics wishing to purchase land, establish schools, or serve in the army. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 was a modest measure, granting little in the way of significant civil rights, and it progressed easily through Parliament, a token of Whig tolerance. However, attempts in 1779 to impose a parallel measure in Scotland, where religious conflicts were nearer to the surface, triggered immediate resistance. A Protestant Association was formed and mass protests organized, resulting in extensive riots in many Scottish towns where Catholic chapels were burned and Catholics attacked in ‘a furious spirit of bigotry and persecution’.⁵⁸ The government, already weak, withdrew the measure. Their victory buoyed Protestant zealots south of the border into action. Under its leader, the charismatic but ultimately unhinged Lord George Gordon, the movement ⁵⁵ The Gordon riots have been closely studied. The most recent examinations are by Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, ch. 5, and C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80 (Manchester, 1993). See also G. Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (Collins, 1952, 1970 edn.) and Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution, ch. 16. ⁵⁶ On the Sacheverell riots, see G. Holmes, ‘The Sacheverell Riots’, Past and Present, lxxii (1976). ⁵⁷ Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England. ⁵⁸ Annual Register (1780), 256.
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whipped up anti-Catholic feeling, supported by elements within the City of London’s common council and the press. A petition calling upon Parliament to repeal the Act of 1778 raised 44,000 signatures. A repeal bill was drafted and, at Gordon’s prompting, the Association determined to organize a mass lobby of Parliament to support its formal reading. This process of lobbying in support of a petition was well established and emphasized the ‘rights’ of the free-born Englishman to make his views known to his representative. Mass lobbies, however, also carried more than a hint of forcible coercion of government, a fact not lost on those in power. Gordon hoped for a crowd of around 20,000. His hopes were more than realized.⁵⁹ On 2 June some 60,000 assembled in St George’s Fields, where they paraded for some two hours. Each was handed a blue cockade before being split into four groups and sent off on separate and circuitous routes to bring them to Parliament. These marches were deliberately intended to augment support and to spread the message of the protestors. According to observers, the initial crowd was in general respectably dressed, though a rougher element joined the contingent that went through the City. Arriving at Westminster, they ‘no sooner possessed themselves of the avenues to both Houses than they began to usurp the most arbitrary and dictatorial power.’ Members of the Lords arriving at Westminster had their carriages attacked and their persons subjected to insult and worse: most were forced ‘to put blue cockades in their hats and call out “No Popery” ’.⁶⁰ Crowds forced their way into the Court of the King’s Bench, stopped proceedings, and tried to get into the Lords but were repulsed. In the Commons the debate on the bill seeking repeal began. With Gordon shuttling between chamber and Westminster Square, retailing news of speeches and whipping up hostility to those who opposed his petition, anger mounted. By nightfall the presence of the Guards enabled a division of the House to be held. Only six voted for Gordon’s motion and the sitting was adjourned. Still the crowds would not depart and in some desperation the government called in troops to clear them.⁶¹ While many went home, a section of the crowd set off to attack Catholic property. At first it was foreigners who felt the heat. The Sardinian ambassador’s chapel in Duke Street was burned, followed by that of the Bavarian embassy, which was ransacked. An attack on the Portuguese chapel was thwarted and a crowd intent on carrying the destruction into the largely Irish district of Moorfields was intercepted and men arrested. The following day was relatively quiet but on the next, a Sunday, a Catholic chapel in Moorfields was attacked, its contents pillaged and the building then burned. Despite these attacks, the city authorities were markedly reluctant to take decisive action.⁶² ⁵⁹ Both the Annual Register (1780), 254–64, and the Gentleman’s Magazine, l (1780), 265–70, carried extensive accounts of the riots. ⁶⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, l (1780), 265–6; Annual Register (1780), 257. ⁶¹ Gentleman’s Magazine, l (1780), 267. ⁶² Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 213–14.
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The next morning a large crowd assembled before Gordon’s house, displaying trophies gathered from the chapels, including a pulpit, which they then burned with some ceremony. That night mobs attacked Catholic chapels in the east of the city and burned schools and a priest’s house.⁶³ Again the magistrates were slow to act, which encouraged the mob to attack the houses of those justices who had taken up men following the first wave of disturbances. When Parliament reassembled on Tuesday, it was greeted by large crowds, decked in blue cockades and carrying flags and various weapons. Mobs elsewhere attacked an Irishman’s shop in Moorfields and threatened Lambeth Palace. As the mood before the Palace of Westminster grew ever more ugly, the Riot Act was read and the Horse Guards were called upon to disperse the crowd. The magistrate who had read the proclamation, Justice Hyde, became the first victim of the incensed crowd. They smashed their way into his house, pulled his furniture into the street, and set it alight. They then marched to Newgate Prison where those taken up earlier were held. The crowd burst into the prison, released all those inside, and set it on fire. When the constables arrived, they were beaten and their staffs, the symbols of their authority, were thrown on to the blaze. Three other prisons were attacked and the inmates released. The town houses of Lords North and Mansfield were assailed, the former being saved, the latter lost to the flames. Throughout the night property owned by Catholics and those deemed supporters of Catholic relief were attacked. The day that followed, known subsequently as Black Wednesday, witnessed disturbances on an even greater scale with attacks on inns, houses, and shops, while the King’s Bench and Fleet prisons were both set on fire. There were also two determined attacks on the Bank, both repelled. Across the city blue flags were hung from every window, ‘No Popery’ signs displayed, and blue cockades decorated the hats and coats of all classes, in part as signs of support, partly as insurance against attack from rampaging mobs. More Catholic property was set on fire: at one stage there were over thirty-six fires raging in the city. The most spectacular conflagration was that at the distillery of Thomas Langdale, who endeavoured to placate them with his product, to no avail. His premises were ransacked and then fired. Some 120,000 gallons of gin made for a spectacular blaze, which eventually engulfed over twenty adjacent houses, the progress of the fire not helped by the fact that the fire engines were inadvertently pumping gin, which had run out of broken casks, back onto the conflagration. Many of the drunken horde died trying to salvage the burning contents from the buildings and gutters around. Troops were rushed from all parts to protect the capital and Hyde Park became a vast army camp. However, it was not until the King took decisive steps to summon the Privy Council and insist that martial law was proclaimed, allowing the soldiers to fire on sight without any reading of the Riot Act or magisterial authority, that a determined counterattack was launched. It was not immediately ⁶³ Annual Register (1780), 259–60.
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successful. In fact, at first the rioters took to carrying and using firearms in response. Mobs attacked and destroyed the tollhouses on Blackfriars Bridge, seizing all the money despite a military force that shot several. Another attack on the Bank was beaten off and across London volunteers, constables, and councilmen, including Wilkes, exchanged fire with rioters, killing many. Not until the Thursday was order was finally restored. The toll in terms of life was spectacular: according to the more reliable estimates, at least 210 dead and a further 75 wounded who subsequently succumbed, though it was possibly higher still.⁶⁴ The toll from the subsequent prosecutions was commensurate: of the 450 taken up, some 62 were sentenced to death and 25 of these hanged.⁶⁵ The Gordon riots had an enormous impact, not just in the capital but around the country. The regional press, which had fully covered the campaign of the Protestant Association, with varying degrees of support, was full of the riots.⁶⁶ Astonishment at the extent of disorder was matched by fears that such disturbances might spread. At Bristol alarm was spread when ‘a Hat with a blue Cockade was hung out at a Public House’. The landlord was seized and placed in prison, while ballad criers were also taken up for ‘crying about seditious Papers’. The ‘principal’ citizens armed in preparation of disturbance and patrolled the streets but no disturbances occurred.⁶⁷ However, at neighbouring Bath the news of the disturbances in London did trigger imitation riots. ‘About twilight, a number of boys, headed by a gentleman’s servant, crying out No Popery, gave the alarm, and their numbers increasing as they ran through the streets, before nine o’clock they formed a body of several hundreds.’ The New Roman Catholic chapel near St James’s Parade was attacked, the fittings taken out and the interior destroyed. ‘In imitation of the London Levellers, they then entered the house adjoining, inhabited by Dr. Brewer, the priest’, demolished the windows, threw out all the furniture, raided the wine cellars, and then set it on fire. Brewer fled through the streets, pursued by an ugly mob, until he finally found sanctuary in the guildhall. The magistrates, arriving at the scene of destruction, read the Riot Act to no avail and, when the city volunteers marched up, they were greeted with ‘a shower of billets, splinter’d wood, firebrands, etc. which wounded several of them’. A rioter was killed, apparently by a pistol fired at the captain by another rioter. The mob, assuming that the volunteers had shot him, ferociously attacked them and drove them off. The shattered chapel, the priest’s house, and several adjoining houses were then set on fire. Soldiers were drafted into the city from around the region and martial law declared. It was widely asserted that ‘the leaders of the riot were persons sent from London’ and that the ‘villains who have chiefly headed the riots ⁶⁴ The Annual Register stated that 285 were shot by the soldiers alone and a further 173 wounded, and some said as many as 800 to 1,000 died. ⁶⁵ Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 215. ⁶⁶ For example, Aris’s Birmiingham Gazette, 19 June 1780; Bath Chronicle, 14 June 1780; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 17 June 1780. ⁶⁷ Manchester Mercury, 20 June 1780. The Protestant Association had established branches both in Bristol and Bath and both tried to raise petitions; Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 207, 210.
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in London have a list of every Roman Catholic Chapel and School throughout the Kingdom, particularly of every new one, and have dispatched their emissaries to go from town to town and destroy them.’ A footman was subsequently hanged for having led the mob. Evidence at the trial claimed that the rioters numbered only some 300–400 but that ‘the spectators were as many thousands’.⁶⁸ At Birmingham, Hull, and Devizes there were similar outbreaks of anti-Catholic feeling while trouble was narrowly averted in Newcastle and Norwich.⁶⁹ The Gordon riots raise many questions about the character of the ‘political mob’. It is clear from the extensive researches of Rudé and more recently of Nicholas Rogers and Colin Haydon that the participants in the riots came from a cross section of the capital’s working people with a substantial leavening of the middling sort. They were not merely the ‘dregs’, as some contemporaries claimed.⁷⁰ Indeed, it is clear that many of the respectable classes were far from hostile towards the rioters, in the early days at least. While some in the Protestant Association cautioned against Gordon’s plan to coerce Parliament, the majority seem to have been entirely supportive and to have continued to connive at the outrages on the grounds that they might force the government to back down, as riots had done in Scotland. The targets of the rioters were not indiscriminately selected. Catholic property was the early aim, but the riots did not spread into general attacks on all Catholics. The poor Irish quarters around the city were largely left unmolested, perhaps because the mobs recognized that their inhabitants would defend themselves with vigour. On the other hand, the houses and chapels of richer Catholics suffered heavily. Rogers emphasizes that they were by a large margin the main victims, their houses attacked, windows smashed, furniture and furnishings destroyed, and often the whole building unroofed and left as a hollow shell. But even here there was little sign of wanton plunder, though it is clear that criminals made the most of the chaos to steal what they could: the Duke of Northumberland had his watch stolen in the mêlée around Parliament on the day of the mass lobby. For the most part the rioters burned the goods taken from houses and chapels. Alehouses that provided meeting rooms for Catholics, and schools that taught Catholics, were destroyed. Rogers notes, ‘what is instructive about the victims of the rioters is not so much their wealth—the majority were no richer than the average middling tradesman—but the crucial role they played in servicing the Catholic community.’⁷¹ While many houses were ransacked, by no ⁶⁸ Bath Chronicle, 15 June, 24 August 1780; Bath Journal, 12 June 1780. The footman was convicted despite the evidence from his master and entire household that he had not strayed from the house when the riots were taking place. ⁶⁹ C. Haydon, ‘The Gordon Riots in the English Provinces’, Historical Research, lxiii (1990), 354–9. ⁷⁰ According to Rudé, the majority of the 110 persons whose occupations were stated at trial, some 70%, were waged, the rest made up of shopkeepers, small employers, and one apothecary. Rudé, Paris and London, 283. The Annual Register (1780), 271–87, carried extensive coverage of the trials. ⁷¹ N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, 165–7. This interpretation differs from that of Rudé, who suggested ‘a distinct class bias’ to the selected targets. Rudé, Paris and London, 286. Haydon is even more emphatic in refuting Rudé’s view: pp. 219–24.
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means all were set on fire. And when houses were set on fire, the mob generally made efforts to ensure that the fire did not spread to neighbouring premises. The riots may have lacked ‘direction’ but they were far from being mindless rampages of the dispossessed. The rioters also targeted the houses of those justices who had intervened decisively against the mob and the houses of the leading members of the political elite. The latter were not confined to members of the ministry. Thus, among those whose property was targeted were Lord North, the Prime Minister, Lord Rockingham, Dunning, and Burke, leading figures in the opposition, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, whose town house and country house at Kenwood were both attacked and destroyed, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This indicated the widespread feeling that those inside Westminster, regardless of faction, had abandoned their proper duty of defence of Protestantism, a point emphasized by Haydon, who sees the riots as part of a much longer tradition of anti-Catholic protests. The assaults on the Bank, the symbol of the triumph of money over social responsibility, on the prisons, where the majority freed were neither arrested rioters nor general criminals but debtors, and on crimping houses, sponging houses, and the tollgates of Blackfriars Bridge, however, suggest a more general alienation from the institutions that sustained the regime. Whether this can be regarded a ‘class’ view, as Rudé argued, or was a more generalized reaction against those seen as undermining one of the key props to national identity and security, as Rogers suggests, remains a subject of ongoing debate. Haydon argues that the attack on the Bank was ‘a departure from the rioters’ original intentions’, and sees them as merely ‘a splinter group’.⁷² Rogers too sees this attack as a ‘spontaneous rather than planned’ act. The rioters ‘paraded flamboyantly before its gates, led by a man on a drayhorse caparisoned with the fetters of Newgate. In the last analysis this was an act of transgression rather than subversion, redolent of misrule.’⁷³ This is very well but such elements of symbolic parade and formal display hardly support the idea that the assault was spontaneous. This is not to say that there was some master plan to seize the Bank. Yet it is clear that the attackers, who were not drunk, were prepared to venture the guns of the troops guarding the Bank to take the building. This smacks of something rather more substantial than a prank. The rioters were encouraged by their success. But for all that, the character of their targets did not change much as time passed. If the rioters increasingly took to carrying and using firearms, this in part reflected the weaponry being deployed against them. There seems to have been an extraordinarily cavalier attitude to the risk of death in the latter stages of the riots: Blackfriars Bridge ‘was taken by storm’⁷⁴ and in the face of determined military resistance. Even so, contemporaries, especially in the provinces, wanted to know how the riots had been allowed to ⁷² Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 228, 242. ⁷⁴ Rudé, Paris and London, 274.
⁷³ Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, 169.
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flourish for so long, apparently unchecked by the civil power. The King and many in London wanted an answer too. One reason was the essential cowardice of many of the city’s magistrates when faced with a mob that was prepared to destroy a justice’s home. The ransacking of Hyde’s house, therefore, probably proved to have been a key tactic for the rioters. It certainly undermined the will of the Lord Mayor, who was reported to have refused to call upon the military since ‘I must be cautious what I do lest I bring the mob to my house.’⁷⁵ In their defence the magistrates fell back upon the ‘confusion’ caused by the terms of the Riot Act, arguing that it was not clear whether the military could be called upon to fire before the stipulated hour from reading the Proclamation had passed. Many lawyers and provincial magistrates found this hard to understand. However, the case of the magistrate who at the ‘St George’s Field massacre’ in 1768 had given the order to the soldiers to open fire probably remained fresh in London justices’ minds. He had been prosecuted for murder at the Middlesex sessions, though he was acquitted at the Old Bailey. Two of the grenadiers who had fired on the crowd, and their officer, had also been committed on a charge of murder by a coroner’s court, even though their case was subsequently dismissed by the Surrey Grand Jury.⁷⁶ Only when martial law was declared and the troops given an effective carte blanche was there a real determination to put down the riots by force. There was, however, another reason for the tardiness of the city authorities in tackling the disorders, namely that many sympathized with the aims of the Protestant Association. The Mayor apparently told an auditor, ‘I can assure you that there are very great people at the bottom of the riot.’ He was not alone in seeing ‘great people’ happy to let the riots run a stage further to secure the repeal of the 1778 Act, to bring down the ministry, or simply to encourage a pogrom of Catholics. This sense of licence from above clearly enlivened and encouraged the rioters in their destructive progress. Even as late as the fifth day of the riots, city politicians voted to warn the government not to ‘sacrifice the security of the Protestant religion to the shrine of Popery’. It made a point in the ongoing political war between City and Westminster, but it was a curious stance to adopt with their city out of control and the mob outside their great civic buildings. Yet when the Bank was threatened, the basis of City wealth, the councilmen were vigorous in its defence, Wilkes among them: he later laconically recorded, ‘killed two rioters directly opposite to the great gate of the Bank’.⁷⁷ CONCLUSION Historians including Rudé and Thompson have suggested that the years from 1715 to 1780 witnessed the earliest stirrings of an independent plebeian political ⁷⁵ C. Hibbert, King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (Longmans, Green and Co., 1958), 64–5, cited in Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution, 357. ⁷⁶ Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, 55. ⁷⁷ Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution, 358, 357.
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consciousness. This contention remains subject to question, yet it is clear that we cannot view the political ‘mob’ in these years simply as the hired tool of the elite. Although mobs could certainly be hired, they were far more likely to be raised by ‘provocation’. The crowd, in political contexts as much as market or work contexts, had clear expectations of what it believed was owed to the country by its rulers. Above all, this was the defence of the Englishman’s liberties. Haydon indeed likens the Gordon riots to ‘the “moral economy” riots of pre-industrial England’, emphasizing their ‘fundamentally conservative nature’.⁷⁸ Attempts to undermine the basis of political liberties stood a good chance of ‘provoking’ resistance. At a local micropolitical level, this was also as true of the non-electors of Tiverton, threatened with the loss of a member who might increase employment, as of those of Honiton when asked by Cobbett to renounce their ‘blessing’. It was equally true of those stirred by Jacobites such as Watkin Williams Wynn to oppose Whig attempts to purchase Chester and of the freeholders of Lichfield who found Anson’s Spanish booty disenfranchising their own small stake in the political process. Wilkes was able to mobilize vast crowds in London and raise supporters around the country by posing as the defender of English liberties. But so, in his way, was Gordon. The political attitudes of the crowd, therefore, remained essentially conservative and reactionary, in that they were ready to resist what they perceived as threats and detrimental changes to their presumed constitutional liberties. However, there is little evidence of independent demands for an extension of these liberties, despite a deep popular sense that the Whig oligarchy was expanding its control over the political process to the detriment of constitutional rights. Ironically, the most notoriously reactionary of all popular political disorders, the Gordon riots, probably had the most negative impact on popular liberty, for they decisively undermined tentative moves towards parliamentary reform. Just as crowds were besieging Parliament to demand the repeal the Catholic Relief Act in the Commons, in the Lords the Duke of Richmond was introducing his bill in favour of manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. The measure stood no chance of success, but it indicated an awareness among some of the younger members of the ruling elite that the ancien régime was losing its political credibility and needed to be seen to reform. Gordon, a radical himself, utterly wrecked such hopes. In the counties, where the Association movement of disgruntled gentry had been increasingly garnering strength, support for reform rapidly fell away.⁷⁹ Magistrates across the country reviewed the consequences of allowing the mob too much rope and determined to take a firmer line with popular protest. This was a view emphasized by the judges of assize and indeed by Lord Chief Justice ⁷⁸ Haydon, Anti-Catholicism, 242, 235. ⁷⁹ On the Association Movement, see I. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (Macmillan, 1966) and H. T. Dickinson, ‘Radicals and Reformers in the Age of Wilkes and Wyvill’, in J. Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (Macmillan, 1990).
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Mansfield. In 1781 he presided at the trial for high treason of Lord George Gordon, even though, as one of the main victims of the mob, he could hardly have been said to be impartial. His summing up, clearly pressing for a guilty verdict that he did not get, provided him with the opportunity to address a wider audience. He used it to extend the interpretation of treason to any action that attempted to coerce the legislature for whatever reason: If men by multitudes rose to raise their wages, it was treason; so it was to pull down and destroy houses or prisons. If a multitude too assembled by force and violence to compel the legislature to grant an Act . . . it was treason. Even multitudes without weapons, engaged in such practices so as they meant to effect their purpose, were also committing high treason, and anyone who was found to aid or encourage, or advise or command it, he was also a principal in the treason.⁸⁰
In a very real sense, then, the Gordon riots did more than set back the cause of parliamentary reform and serve as a dreadful warning to the authorities of the dangers of the mob allowed to run riot. They marked the start of a changing attitude towards the licence previously allowed to militant manifestations of the free-born Englishman and towards a clear rejection of the moral economy of the crowd.
⁸⁰ Bath Chronicle, 14 June 1781. Mansfield had had two houses destroyed by the mob: Gentleman’s Magazine, l (1780), 294.
9 The Repudiation of the Moral Economy After the extensive food riots of 1766, concerns over food supply slipped from public debate. While population rose, the growing impact of enclosures, aided by a national transport system now supplemented by extensive canal building, seemed to assure markets of grain supplies throughout the year. Good harvests predominated over bad and the increasing sophistication of the European grain trade allowed surpluses to be exported, aided by the bounty, or imports to be called in when necessary. Even localized disturbances in 1772–3, 1782–3 and again, briefly, in 1792–3, did not seem overmuch to disturb this essentially optimistic view. Roger Wells notes that ‘The assumption of plenty is reflected in governmental indifference to annual agricultural progress, which was shared by the press.’¹ Political economists, as we have noted earlier, took advantage of this mood to secure the repeal in 1772 of the old statutes on engrossing, forestalling, and regrating. The old moral economy was an anachronism. Its legal basis was, they believed, irretrievably dismantled. The brave new world of unfettered markets promised regularity and plenty. However, the grim spectre of dearth had not gone away. The harvest of 1794, spoiled by a long, hot, and dry summer, proved deficient while the war against revolutionary France, commenced with widespread support in 1793, soon disrupted links within the Continental grain trade. Winter brought prolonged and extreme cold, which withered autumn-sown wheat. Millponds froze, halting milling, work in the fields stopped, and warps, frozen in the loom, broke, preventing weaving. With prices rising rapidly, most towns organized subscriptions for the needy.² Poor rates rose sharply and even the employed slipped into want. The Oldham weaver, William Rowbottom, recorded in his diary on 17 February 1795, ‘Everey Nessecary of life rises astonishingly So that the poor are in a most ¹ R. Wells, Wretched Faces. Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1803 (Alan Sutton, 1988), 36. This work is the definitive study of the crisis. ² See, for example, the efforts in Bath: Bath Journal, 12 January 1795. Interestingly, in neighbouring Bristol, such schemes for the relief of the poor lagged some seven months behind. S. Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition: Market Management in Bristol, 1709–1815’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996), 103.
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Lamentable Condition.’ It was to be a refrain that would dominate his diary entries for the next six years.³ Popular suspicion, as before, immediately fell upon the dealers. Threatening letters soon began to warn that their machinations in forestalling markets had been noticed. In April one to the magistrates in Salisbury complained of ‘Rook and other carriers scowering the market of every thing so inhabitance cant buy a single artickel without going to the dealers for it and pay what extortionat price the think proper.’ It warned, however, ‘But their time soon be at an end for when soldiers leave are 300 swor to be trow to each other for the destruction of the carriers unless you order changes. Stop butchers sending meat away—make them cut it up in market.’⁴ The presence of soldiers, however, did not guarantee security. In the same month, men of the 112 Regiment stationed at Wells ‘marched into the market place with fixed bayonets’ and forced the butter dealers to sell their produce well below the asking price: ‘they afterwards sold potatoes at a price fixed by themselves.’ The soldiers, ‘emboldened by their success and encouraged by the lower class of people, avow their intention of going into the neighbouring villages to the mills &c and to set the price of other provisions.’ Their officers proved unable to control them.⁵ These were but precursors to extensive disturbances which broke out in June. Late frosts in that month damaged spring-sown crops already hard hit by drought. Speculators began to buy up what was left of the old stocks, causing rapid price rises and increasingly severe shortages across the country. In such circumstances any movement of grain was now likely to provoke crowd action. At Tewkesbury a crowd, ‘chiefly females’, attacked the barges laden with wheat flour at the quay and carried off large quantities before the local authorities could intervene.⁶ At Bristol, riots broke out in the fish market as dealers put up the price of mackerel, even though supply was plentiful. A fish dealer’s house was stoned, fish carts ‘were thrown into the tide’, and one dealer, who had contrived to get a quantity of fish on board a boat . . . to carry to Bath, was overtaken by some of the mob near Hanham, when several of them threw themselves in, brought the boat to shore, took the fish out and divided them, and after pretty roughly handling him and giving him a ducking, let him go, the boat they set adrift.
Magistrates intervened ‘to reduce the price of fish and other provisions, which are most shamefully dear’. Men from the East Devon militia stationed in the city were suspected of leading the disorders.⁷ Dean colliers marched to Monmouth, where they set about regulating the market, while major riots broke out at Mitcheldene, following reports that ³ Oldham Local Studies Library, MF/G19, Rowbottom Dairies, 17 February 1795. On 31 December 1794: ‘Given and the Dearness of all the Necesaris of life it is imposable for persons with large familys to Get what Nature requires.’ ⁴ HO 42/34, letter from Salisbury, 6 April 1795. ⁵ Ibid., John Turner to ‘Sir’, 28 April 1795. ⁶ HO 42/35, Fourke to Portland, 25 June 1795. ⁷ Bath Journal, 8 June 1795; Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition’, 106.
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Richard Prince, ‘a considerable mealman near Mitchedene, bought up grain and sent it abroad’. A large crowd assembled, smashed the doors and windows of his mill house, and then demolished the millstones. The mob had left long before troops arrived. The following day crowds at Blakeney seized a barge, declaring that it should not go out of the country, as they were in great want, and would purchase it with ready money at a fair price. The country gentlemen interposed, and convinced them that the vessel was bound to Swansea, for the relief of the distressed manufacturers there; with this, and a promise that they should have a part of it, they seemed to be satisfied; but towards the evening, from a misunderstanding, or at the instigation of some wicked and ill-disposed persons . . . they began to unload the vessel, and lodged a part of the cargo in a warehouse.
Troops restored order but, ‘At the request of the gentlemen, the owner spared a quantity of wheat sufficient for their immediate wants, and more than 350 bushels were measured out to them at a moderate price.’ In fact, the grain was purchased by ‘the gentlemen of the Forest, for the relief of the industrious and sober poor in their neighbourhood till the approaching harvest’. They later sought subscribers to help pay off the debt.⁸ Rioting became general. In the rapidly growing manufacturing town of Birmingham, which had been untouched by food rioting earlier in the century, the brand-new Snow Hill steam-powered corn mill of James Pickard was attacked in early June by an angry crowd, made up mostly of women. Pickard, an entrepreneur of some resource, had combined in one site the roles and functions of mealman, miller, and baker and had thereby acquired a significant grip on the Birmingham flour and bread market.⁹ With prices rapidly rising, his premises became a ready target for hostility. Trouble began innocently enough in a spat between one ‘poor woman’ and Pickard’s maidservant. The woman had complained that her loaf, its size regulated by the assize of bread, was smaller than usual. The servant told her that she should not complain, ‘as our condition was so much better than that of some other countries’. In France, she said, the common people were reduced to the necessity of eating grains. The malicious, it seems, soon perverted and fixed the expression on her master, and it was quickly rumoured Mr Pickard has said he would make the poor eat grains in their bread.
More importantly, it was also said that Pickard’s mill held large quantities of corn. This was enough to trigger disorder. At first the women merely threw stones at the windows, breaking several. A passing magistrate ordered them to stop. That served only to inflame them. Egged on by ‘furious women’, soon ‘stones and brick-ends’ were flying towards both mill and hapless authorities. Before long rioters were inside the mill’s counting house, ⁸ Gloucester Journal, 29 June 1795. ⁹ For Pickard, see R. A. Pelham, ‘Corn Milling and the Industrial Revolution in England in the Eighteenth Century’, Birmingham Historical Journal, vi (1957–8), 161–75.
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destroying Pickard’s books. The arrival of the Warwickshire Yeomanry restored order for a while. But, when night fell, a renewed attack was made. Dragoons had been positioned inside the mill for its defence and captured some of the attackers. However, when they attempted to remove them to the town gaol, ‘a rescue was attempted’. The mob beat, pelted and pressed upon the soldiers from every side; it was in vain that by slightly wounding some with their bayonets, they endeavoured to keep them off, and that three of them discharged their pieces over the people’s heads—this instead of intimidating only increased the violence; and at length so furious was the attack that to preserve his own life and in obedience to the orders which he had received from the peace officer, one of the dragoons fired upon his assailants.
Two men were shot dead. That night, handbills of ‘a criminal and inflammatory nature’ calling upon the people to renew the protests were stuck up around the town. The ‘principal inhabitants’ and magistrates immediately offered a reward of 100 guineas for information leading to the conviction of the ‘wicked incendiaries’ responsible for the bills.¹⁰ No such information was forthcoming. The industrial heartland of Lancashire was convulsed by riots as crowds blamed rocketing prices on speculators. Rowbottom recorded on 25 July, ‘at Manchester this day provisions rose so as to be nearly out of the reach of the poor’. Three days later he noted a price-setting riot at Delph. ‘Richard Broom Bread Baker of Oldham Conveing is Loafes to Delph was met near Delph by a Gang of Tumultuous women who Emtied his Carrivan of the Bread and Sold it Two pence per pound and returnd Broom the Money.’ At Manchester, ‘owing to the uncomon price of the Diferent Nessecarys of Life a large Mob Collected in Manchester Chiefly women and Boys who did a deal of Damage by Breaking windows and distroying furniture of the Corn dealers and Swailers.’ These riots were put down by the cavalry. At Oldham ‘a large number of women and Boys Collected to Gether and Broke the Windows’ of the local dealers, ‘these deluded people beleiving it to be these Swailers that Caused meal to be so dear’. Dragoons were brought in to assist in the arrest of the ringleaders, two men and two women, but when they attempted to escort their handcuffed prisoners to Manchester the mobers made a Terable atack with stones on the Military in order to rescque the prisoners the Soldiors Sent for more assisance which Emedeately Joined them and by firing their pistols and salshing away wit their swords wounded several of the Riotters and put their prisoners into a Coach and Conveied them safe to prison.
At Manchester another ‘mob’ seized ‘a Cart load of meal belonging to William Waring of Waterhead Mill wich they emediately Devided when the Majestrates with the Light Horse again Dispersed them’. Similar guerrilla actions were taking place across the north-west. At Oldham the leading magistrate put pressure on the ¹⁰ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 June 1795.
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dealers to lower prices and, while crowds continue to assemble and threaten intervention, peace was more or less maintained. The same was not true in neighbouring Rochdale where in early August a large crowd demanding lower prices refused to disperse and, under the direct orders of the Rector, Dr Drake, the local Fencible cavalry were ordered to fire on them, killing two men and wounding others. The incident soured social relations in the town for years after.¹¹ From across the country local authorities desperately sought governmental support in securing food supplies.¹² Such requests increased when the 1795 harvest proved to be the disaster many had feared. A government enquiry later revealed that wheat yields were at best only 75 to 80 per cent of an average year. The steady shift, even in the north, to a diet based on fine wheaten bread in the second half of the century exacerbated the problem, for, even though the barley and oats crops proved good, few would readily return to a coarser foodstuff. The efforts by the government to compel the consumer to abandon the fine wheat loaf generated resentment.¹³ Hunger alone forced consumption towards other commodities. Throughout the late summer and autumn riots persisted nationwide. With the major centres of population desperately seeking supplies, foodstuffs increasingly moved to those markets offering the highest prices, much to the disgust and anger of those who regarded locally grown foodstuffs as ‘theirs’. For example, at Oxford, a main centre of the corn trade in the Midlands, riots centred on the canal along which grain was shipped towards the Birmingham and Lancashire markets.¹⁴ As Charlesworth shows, no region escaped extensive disorders. Cornwall and Devon witnessed major outbreaks while East Anglia was severely affected, with extended disorders in Essex and Suffolk, in Norfolk around Norwich and on the northern coast, and in the Fens. Wiltshire and Somerset, old food rioting centres, were again affected while food riots broke out in County Durham and in Northumberland, which, after 1740, had seen little in the way of this sort of disorder.¹⁵ Only through massive importations of grain was the situation eventually stabilized. Flooding onto the market, they depressed market prices so that, as Wells notes, ‘the first famine was effectively terminated before the 1796 harvest’. Although yields were not high, prices slowly sank back towards more affordable ¹¹ Rowbottom Diaries, entries for 25, 22 July, 3, 5 August 1795. For riots in the wider region, see A. Booth, ‘Food Riots in the North-west of England 1790–1801’, Past and Present, lxxvii (1977). ¹² For example, the Bristol corporation, the magistrates of Dean and of Gloucester, among many others, all petitioned for urgent government action. HO 42/35, Joseph Smith, Mayor of Bristol, to Portland, 4 July 1795; Matthews to Berkeley, 6 July, 1795; Mayor of Gloucester to Portland, 4 August 1795. ¹³ On the government’s attempts to force dietary reform on consumers, see Wells, Wretched Faces, 202–18, and J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911; Longman, 1978), 80–6. ¹⁴ W. Thwaites, ‘Oxford Food Riots: A Community and its Markets’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets. Market Culture and Popular Protest, 150–3. ¹⁵ A. Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900 (Croom Helm, 1983), 97–100.
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levels because overall output rose, the result of the huge expansion of wheat cultivation in the autumn–winter of 1795–6 when farmers and landlords rushed to cash in on inflated prices.¹⁶ Only four years later, the catastrophic experience was replicated. The harvest of 1799 proved very poor and prices rose rapidly once winter set in. This disaster for the poor coincided with the start of a major industrial depression in many manufacturing districts, exacerbating pressure upon living standards. Riots broke out in Lancashire in October and November¹⁷ but it was from January 1800 that the situation worsened appreciably, with riots once again extending across much of the country. In the Midlands price-fixing riots were mingled with attacks on farmers, while in the south-east magistrates were subject to intense pressure from crowds.¹⁸ In February a ‘large Mob’, which had assembled at Ashton ‘in Consequence of the Dearness of provisions’, clashed with the local volunteers: ‘the mob made a violant assault on the Militaria with a shower of stones wich Dangerously wounded Several both officers and privates.’ They then marched to the home of a ‘Considerable Corn Dealer where the took possession of his Goods Sold Meal and Flour at reduced prices’. Cold and hunger were taking a heavy toll. As Rowbottom noted, ‘the poor in a most Schocking Situation a Great deal are starving for Bread and verey few Can Get Anny thing Better then Barly Bread Barley pootage Barley Dumplins pottatoes Being so Excesively dear that the poor Cannot buy them.’¹⁹ In April the miners from the Forest of Dean again took to stopping barges on the Wye and Severn. A magistrate, Revd Williams, supported by ‘a detachment of the Berkshire fencible cavalry, quartered at Ross’, confronted them and read the Riot Act. When the crowd not only refused to disperse but began to stone the soldiers, some of the soldiers were compelled to fire in their own defence, and one of the most daring of the rioters was shot through the shoulder, but not dangerously. It was even with difficulty that the barges were then suffered to proceed on their voyage; and the mob only dispersed, under a threat of intercepting them farther down the river.
Williams, finding ‘that many of the poor deluded people were very distressed for want of bread . . . laudably set on foot a subscription . . . to supply 127 poor families with wheat at Lidbrooke, at the reduced price of 14s and barley 7s 6d per bushel, of ten gallons.’ The following day barges were intercepted at Redbrooke when only the presence of the Monmouth Volunteers prevented rioters seizing the contents. Two days later, however, another barge was stopped there and the entire contents sold at 10s. 6d. per bushel.²⁰ ¹⁶ Wells, Wretched Faces, 37. ¹⁷ Rowbottom Diaries, 28, 31 October, 30 November 1799. Rowbottom noted that the corn harvested in the Oldham area was ‘in General Spoyled and is Exstreemly light to the Great Distress of the poor’, 12 December 1799. ¹⁸ Charlesworth, An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain, 100–3. ¹⁹ Rowbottom Diaries, 3 February, 19 March 1800. ²⁰ Bath Journal, 7 April 1800.
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In Bath a minor fracas ‘between a seller of potatoes and an old woman’ rapidly turned into a major riot. The woman, being exasperated at the price demanded, in her passion overturned a large basket of potatoes, which were quickly gathered up and carried off by the surrounding women and children. The mob presently increased to a great number and all the farmers’ sacks were emptied and the potatoes carried away.
The crowd then marched to Walcot where they found ‘a large quantity buried for preservation’ at a market gardener’s premises. The potatoes were seized and the man severely assaulted. Although the authorities emphasized their determination to crush all disorder, the riot was followed by renewed appeals for subscriptions.²¹ In Oldham handbills calling for a public meeting on the cost of living led the magistrates to summon both the Oldham Horse and Foot Associations and dragoons from Manchester: ‘a deal of people asembled but nothing of a mobing nature was attemted Except a few women and boys who Stoned the Soldiers.’²² The government, thoroughly alarmed, again exerted every effort to secure massive imports of grain. For a period these new supplies did the trick and, with a hot summer foretelling a good harvest, prices positively slumped. Cartoonists mocked the greed of farmers who, having stockpiled grains awaiting ever-higher prices, now faced forced sale at much lower rates. In common with many papers, the Bath Journal was full of reports of such would-be profiteers, gleefully noting that Last week Mr M——n, a respectable farmer near Bishop’s Clyst, attending a market town in Devon, asked 25s per bushel for wheat, which so displeased the populace, that without the least ceremony, they threw a rope round his waist, and dragged him violently about the street. On their first stopping to give him time to breathe, they cried, ‘how much now farmer?’—‘Oh, one guinea per bushell.’ On stopping him a second time, with ‘How much now farmer?’ ‘Oh! eighteen shillings,’ and soon after roared out fourteen shillings! 14s! on which the mob let go the rope, and he fled with great precipitation.²³
But the forestallers had the last laugh. A thoroughly wet August saw the harvest delayed and in many areas spoiled. In Trowbridge rioters, protesting at rising prices, ‘attacked several of the hucksters shops’. In September prices shot up and what Wells terms a ‘hyper-crisis’ commenced. At Bristol ‘a large mob’ sought out hoarded flour and were charged by the cavalry, which rapidly dispersed them, while at Cirencester and Tetbury, major corn markets, similar price-fixing riots occurred.²⁴ Riots broke out along the south coast in ports handling grain shipments, in Kent, across the East and West Midlands, and in Yorkshire.²⁵ In Lancashire rioters disrupted the markets at Wigan and Lancaster while at ²¹ Bath Journal, 12 May 1800; HO 42/50, Brown to Portland, 17 May 1800. A boy was subsequently sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for his part in this disturbance. Bath Journal, 28 July 1800. ²² Rowbottom Diaries, 20 May 1800. ²³ Bath Journal, 4 August 1800. ²⁴ Bath Journal, 18 August, 22 September 1800; HO 42/51, Rooke to Portland, 19 September 1800. ²⁵ Wells, Wretched Faces, 128, 131–2, 124–7.
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Blackburn they paraded the streets armed with large sticks. No violence ensued but the demonstration was backed up by posters depicting gibbets which made clear that the crowd were well aware of those whose market practices were threatening their welfare.²⁶ At Nottingham the locally raised infantry were brought in to protect market traders, but the poor inhabitants, who are alone discontented, absolutely defy them. . . . The women are the principal aggressors, and they are permitted to remain at liberty. . . . This morning about one o’clock, a large party attacked a baker’s shop . . . they ransacked the shop of all the flour they could find, which they exhibited to the persons present as containing chalk, alum and other poisonous substances.²⁷
In Birmingham riots again broke out while at Kings Lynn ‘a tumultuous assemblage of persons, chiefly women, induced by the rapid rise of corn and flour in Lynn market that day’, attacked a miller and inflicted major damage to his house. They dispersed when the Riot Act was read but reassembled the next day and again wreaked havoc on the property of the same miller. At Chesterfield miners from Ashover invaded the market and ‘fixed a maximum upon every market article’.²⁸ For the first time serious food riots broke out in London. Successive governments had made it a priority to ensure that the capital city was well supplied with grain. Riots in the provinces were one thing: food riots in the capital, particularly in the aftermath of the Gordon riots, quite another. Yet the problems created for consumers by the sudden price rises provoked anger here too with the major market at Mark Lane proving the focus. On 15 September crowds pelted dealers, sought to fix prices, and resisted attempts to prevent them. Coaches were stopped and their passengers forced to doff their hats to the rioters. As nightfall came the crowd continued to target dealers, singling out in particular John Rusby, who had earlier been convicted for regrating corn in a famous trial before the King’s Bench.²⁹ The ‘mob’, The Times reported, was highly organized. ‘Two men preceded them along the road, who broke every lamp as they passed, for fear of being recognized.’ Rusby escaped while his wife pleaded with the crowd. She and her children were allowed to leave unharmed before the mob broke in and smashed all the furniture. Others, including a cheesemonger, also had their properties attacked. Heavy policing eventually restored order.³⁰ In Coventry riots followed the arrival of ‘an immense body’ of Bedworth colliers, ‘armed with bludgeons’. Ignoring the mayor and magistrates’ injunctions to return home, they entered the city to the acclaim of the town ‘mob’. The combined groups then set about price-fixing or plundering the bakers’ shops. Dragoons eventually cleared the streets.³¹ ²⁶ Booth, ‘Food Riots in the North-west of England’, 100; Manchester Mercury, 30 September 1800. ²⁷ The Times, 5 September 1800. ²⁸ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 12 September 1800; The Times, 12 September 1800. ²⁹ See pp. 236–7 ³⁰ The Times, 17 September 1800. For an extended account, see Wells, Wretched Faces, 128–31. ³¹ The Times, 13 September 1800.
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Severely shaken, the ministry reintroduced generous bounties on imports and approved legislation allowing parishes to establish granaries and distribute grain in lieu of poor relief.³² This calmed matters for a while though tensions and sporadic disturbances persisted into the winter. However, in the spring major disorders broke out in the south-west. Here the harvest of 1800 had been good, but the stockpiled grain soon began to be bought up and transported to other regions. Angry crowds sought to force farmers and magistrates to sign binding agreements to regulate local prices. In Exeter a crowd of ‘about 1000’ assembled and ‘visited, in different parties, the farmers for miles around and obliged them to sign an agreement to bring their wheat to market and sell it at 10s a bushel; and potatoes and other articles in proportion. They also obliged the bakers to sell the quartern loaf at 9d or 10d but they did no mischief.’ These prices were enforced in two successive markets. A similar pattern followed at Wellington and Taunton, where peaceable crowds likewise enforced price agreements, though the frightened farmers refused to carry corn thereafter to Taunton market ‘and an absolute deficiency of bread was experienced’. In Exeter, where some 700 special constables were sworn and backed up with three troops of dragoons in an attempt to regain order, the authorities also led subscriptions of ‘upwards of £3000’ towards ‘the purchase of foreign corn and flour as a relief to the poor’. In Wellington, Shropshire, the miners ‘compelled the farmers to sign a paper, the purport of which was that the market would be supplied with wheat at ten shillings a bushel’. It had been selling at 24s. At Plymouth rioters seized butchers’ meat and bread, ‘paying anything or nothing for it, just at they thought proper’, and at Bristol ‘a large body of men, women and boys . . . obliged the butchers, farmers &c. to sell their meat, butter, and other articles of provisions at very reduced prices’. At Modbury in Devon a ‘mob, consisting of near seven hundred people’, attempted to coerce two magistrates to sign a paper to limit the price of corn, butter, and potatoes.³³ Prices continued to rise until the spring of 1801. Only then did large importations of wheat begin to stabilize supplies. However, dealers played their cards more cannily than in 1796 and released corn more carefully onto the markets. Only when the harvest was near and it became clear to all that the prospects were excellent did prices fall steeply. Rowbottom noted gradual falls in price from May but in August noted with delight: As the Greatest Blesing the Almighty Can bestow on us by Sending us plenty it as pleased him to Send is Harbinger fine weather wich is So uncomon fine and seasonable as was never known before so that it as a visable Efect upon the Corn market wich now Coming Down a pace. ³² 41 Geo. III, c.12. ³³ The Times, 3, 6, 28 April 1801; Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, 11 April 1801. For a definitive account of the riots in Devon and Cornwall in 1801, see R. Wells, ‘The Revolt of the South-west, 1800–1801: A Study in English Popular Protest’, Social History, vi (1977), 713–44.
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Five days later he noted ‘Manchester this day their was the fullest market Ever Remembered particularly Meal and pottatoes the former of wich fell full 10s and the latter Sold 6s a load wich put a Chearful Countinance on the face of the poor.’ And on the 17th he recorded: Through the Blesings of God there is the Greatest prospect of plenty Ever Remembered by the Oldest person living the Feilds being so Compleately Covered as Eaqually to astonish and Delight the beholder for Cast your Eyes and the are Grattified with beholding the Goolden Collored field Deckt with the Greatest Crops of Wheat Oats and Barley wich in general are now Droping ripe and whole fields of pottatoes with their Green verdue a doble Crop fill the mass of this Earthly happiness.³⁴
The harvest did not disappoint. The long subsistence crisis at last was over. Historians examining the food riots of 1795–1801 have discerned in them a real turning point in the pattern of popular protest. Certainly the extraordinarily extensive and prolonged disorders of these years had no precedent, nor could subsequent food riots match them. Indeed, thereafter, with the exception of the ‘bread or blood’ riots in East Anglia in 1816, food riots tended to be localized and relatively short in duration. One simple explanation for this change is the way in which agricultural output increased dramatically following the extensive enclosures that took place during the French wars, a direct consequence of the spectacular prices obtained for all arable produce in these crisis years. However, leading historians of protest have argued that the pattern of the riots and the ways in which they were treated by the authorities indicate a sea change in attitudes and responses that helps account for this. Edward Thompson argued that the riots of this period, though forming a climacteric, marked a transition from one tradition to another. The older pattern of gentry–crowd relationships was, he argued, being undermined both by increasingly powerful economic pressures on wages and by a new politics polarized by Jacobinism and reaction: The forms of action [of the old moral economy] depended upon a particular set of social relations, a particular equilibrium between paternalist authority and the crowd. This equilibrium was dislodged in the wars . . . [by] the acute anti-Jacobinism of the gentry . . . [and] by the triumph of the new ideology of political economy. . . . The older form of action lingered on into the 1840s. . . . But in the new territories of the industrial revolution it passed by stages into other forms of action.³⁵
This emphasis on seeing industrialization as the key to the change from food rioting to other forms of protest is shared by John Bohstedt, who in every other respect sees himself as a critic of Thompson’s thesis. Bohstedt argues that the years from 1795 to 1801 saw a fundamental shift in the pattern and meaning of food riots nationally because the crowds in the newly industrializing towns and regions ³⁴ Rowbottom diaries, 3, 8, 17 August 1801. ³⁵ E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, l (1971), 128, 129.
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which now found themselves faced with rapidly rising food prices lacked the learned culture of ‘riot behaviour’, which informed the ‘classic’ food riot in older manufacturing centres. Whereas, in regions such as Devon, the crowd and the authorities understood their respective roles within the ‘community politics’ of riot, those in the ‘new’ towns of industrial Lancashire had not had the opportunity to forge the necessary relationships and alliances which made successful negotiative food rioting a practical solution to crisis. In Manchester riots were, perforce, much more brutish and dangerous since neither ‘side’ knew how the other would behave.³⁶ Roger Wells, the leading historian of these disorders, sees simpler reasons to account for a disappearance of older models of moral economy: the very real imperatives of famine, he argues, displaced any ideological niceties or ‘traditional’ modes of behaviour. ‘The nineties in general, and the famines in particular, witnessed recurrent crises in the relationship between society and the state.’ Whereas in earlier crises, government had reasserted the old models of moral economy, in the 1790s it pressed consumers to change their diets, promoted free market solutions, and concentrated upon the repression of dissent.³⁷ In so far as a ‘moral economy’ continued to provide a model for crowd action, it was simply as a residual and pragmatic means to mobilize popular power. Are such changes evident when the riots are reviewed both on a national scale and in the perspective of the previous century of popular protest? Can we discern, within the pattern of rioting, the repudiation by both authorities and by the crowd of the old models of the moral economy? Let us start by enquiring how far Bohstedt’s assertion that food riots in ‘new’ industrializing communities like Manchester evinced an essentially different pattern to those ‘classic’ food riots, which, he argues, still characterized disorders in ‘older’ centres of manufacturing production? According to this model, the rapidly growing centres of population lacked the necessary community identity to sustain the sort of orderly protests which he believes constituted a ‘classic’ food riot. In consequence, ‘class polarisation in Manchester in large part grew out of the structured alienation of urban politics and out of particular violent movements.’³⁸ Such a view has been severely criticized by Andrew Charlesworth, who points out that the workers of this ‘city of strangers’, supposedly filled with ‘recent migrants into a new urban industrial world’ who therefore should have lacked any collective identity, in fact had proved very willing to mount an assertive, organized, and generally non-violent defence of industrial custom and living standards in the later eighteenth century.³⁹ Nor were food riots unknown in the town. In 1757 ³⁶ J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Harvard, 1983), 27–99. See also J. Bohstedt, ‘Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots 1790–1810’, Past and Present, cxx (1988), 88–122. ³⁷ Wells, Wretched Face, 335–6. ³⁸ Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, 69. ³⁹ A. Charlesworth, ‘From the Moral Economy of Devon to the Political Economy of Manchester, 1790–1812’, Social History, xviii(2) (1993), 205–17.
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serious food rioting had broken out in Manchester. In June and again in November colliers and weavers attacked corn mills and dealers and seized wheat, oatmeal, and potatoes, resulting in major clashes with both volunteers and the regular army. Within weeks, disorders had spread across the whole region.⁴⁰ These riots were linked to industrial disputes over customary wage levels. Thus it was claimed that, as the price of bread rose, the wages of the poor decreased because the employers ‘refused to pay the Workmen their accustomed Wages for their Work’.⁴¹ This pattern, of food riots becoming linked with industrial disputes, was replicated in 1795–1801. It is true that some thirty-eight years separated these major disturbances (though we cannot, in the absence of detailed local research, be sure that no food rioting occurred). However, this does not mean that their impact was forgotten. We might, for example, compare Manchester in this respect to the situation in Bristol, where the impact of extensive disorders in 1757 resulted in a determination by the local authorities thereafter to ensure that they retained a tight grip on markets and marketing practices.⁴² Certainly in 1795–6 the Manchester authorities were most concerned to be seen to be regulating markets and upholding the moral economic model of the ‘proper’ modes of marketing foodstuffs to their numerous inhabitants.⁴³ This is not to deny that social relations in Manchester were often tense and were deteriorating. The authorities, very much linked to the larger cotton masters, were certainly worried about the dangers posed by the organizational power of their workforce.⁴⁴ They were also alarmed by the mounting evidence that their spies were unearthing about the spread of Jacobin radicalism and insurrectionary organization, fears which, as Glen has shown for neighbouring Stockport, were by no means entirely fanciful.⁴⁵ And it may be that the Manchester authorities were becoming more than ready to utilize the mounted troops stationed in the town to suppress disorder. But their provision of soup kitchens cannot be seen simply as reflecting an ideological shift from provision regulation to remedial charity. Such charitable actions were to be found everywhere, reflecting the impotence felt by all local authorities at their inability to locate adequate food supplies for their markets when faced with near-famine conditions.⁴⁶ Confirmation that old attitudes continued to be ascendant comes from the Manchester press. Newspapers of both political persuasions, in common with most of the regional press, continued to condemn market manipulation and malpractice throughout
⁴⁰ Whitworth’s Manchester Advertiser, 21 November 1757; Manchester Mercury, 15 November 1757. ⁴¹ J. Collier, The Truth in a Mask, or Shudhill Fight (Manchester, 1757), 14. ⁴² On the case of Bristol, see the excellent account by Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition’, 91–114. ⁴³ Charlesworth, ‘From the Moral Economy of Devon’, 208–9; see also Thompson, ‘Moral Economy’, 96 n. 64. ⁴⁴ See, pp. 260–1. ⁴⁵ R. Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (Croom Helm, 1984), 117–39. ⁴⁶ Again the case of Bristol is instructive (see Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition’), but towns and cities around the country, including London, all exhibited the same approach.
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the succeeding crises.⁴⁷ The choleric Manchester magistrate T. B. Bayley was in no doubt that the newspapers were inflaming the situation ‘with accounts of riots in other places and inflammatory paragraphs about forestallers etc.’.⁴⁸ None of this suggests that Manchester constituted a new paradigm. Nor did the cotton districts around demonstrate a clear shift from ‘classic’ moral economic responses to ‘cavalry and soup kitchens’ tokenism. At nearby Oldham, as noted, paternal interventions and regulation went side by side with both the vigorous use of force to curb disorder and extensive charitable provision. The case of Manchester can be compared with that of Birmingham, which likewise was developing rapidly from a manufacturing town into a major industrial conurbation. How far is it possible to discern a shift here from a moral economic to a market mentality in the period? We noted earlier the attacks upon Pickard’s steam-powered corn mills in June 1795. Pickard’s mills became the focus for new disorders in September 1800. As previously, they began with a minor market fracas when consumers objected to the prices being charged by a small local corn dealer. He fled, hotly pursued, into an inn in Bull Street. That evening a large crowd attacked shops owned by bakers and mealmen and seized or stole bread and flour. Dragoons and a new volunteer force, the Birmingham Light Horse, were rapidly mustered and eventually restored order to the streets. However, in the morning a large crowd surrounded Pickard’s mill. This time it was the mill’s employees who defended the property, firing at the crowd, killing two boys and wounding two others. The magistrates, calling up the dragoons, the Light Horse, and the Birmingham Loyal Association, drove the crowd from the field and commenced systematic street patrols under conditions of virtual curfew. Order was once more restored.⁴⁹ The Birmingham riots have much in common with those in Manchester. In both, millers and dealers, traditional targets of food rioters, were attacked following rumours of hoarding. Certainly in the aftermath of the 1800 Birmingham riot, millers, dealers, and factors were anxious to dissociate themselves from charges of engrossing. One publicly offered to show ‘proper officers’ of the town around his premises to prove his innocence.⁵⁰ However, new steam mills, such as Pickard’s,
⁴⁷ The Tory Manchester Mercury and the Whig Manchester Gazette continued to blame speculators for the shortages throughout both crises. Surprisingly the Gazette even supported calls for tight regulation of the corn trade, dismissing concerns about the autonomy of private property: ‘we must observe that individuals have only a qualified property in articles of general use and necessity.’ Manchester Gazette, 1 November 1800. ⁴⁸ HO 42/53, Bayley to Home Office, 21 October 1800. Bayley published a letter in the Mercury in August 1795 in which he condemned the riots in July as having been carried on ‘for very wicked purposes’. Yet this ‘official’ view contrasted with his admission to Portland that shortages were exacerbated by ‘undue monopoly’. Manchester Mercury, 4 August 1795; HO 42/50, Bayley to Portland, 23 June 1795. ⁴⁹ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 15 September 1800. The riots were the last straw for Pickard, who announced that he was abandoning the trade, putting up for sale not only his Snow Hill mill but also his coal yard, wharf, and seven boats. ⁵⁰ Ibid.
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which also doubled as bakeries, clearly betokened a new force in the food market and one distrusted not only by both poor and wealthier consumers alike but also by small bakers who rightly feared for their trades. As in Manchester, the Birmingham crowd demonstrated some ‘classic’ moral economic characteristics. The summoning of the mob and the crowd’s anger at the seizure of its fellows in both years echoed earlier disturbances elsewhere, while in the more extensive 1800 riots Birmingham rioters clearly engaged in price fixing. Here, too, the authorities were quick to employ force to restore order. Yet we should not be inclined to read into the events of these years too abrupt a transition towards a class-based social fracture within the town. As in Manchester, extensive efforts were applied towards charitable relief via public subscriptions as a means of buying off popular disorder.⁵¹ As in Manchester and Bristol, the authorities understood that they needed to keep their markets open and attractive to farmers since they could not in any other way coerce them to supply their needs. But they recognized the imperative of being seen to regulate markets to reassure customers that they were not being exploited.⁵² Here too the press were ambivalent in their attitudes. Aris’s Gazette detested rioters but could not entirely escape older moral economic attitudes, distinguishing the less-reprehensible actions of the pricefixing ‘mob’ from ‘the unprincipled rabble’ who, ‘most dishonestly’, simply looted foodstuffs. The same distinction was made in its account of price-fixing rioters at a Dudley mill who sold out wheat at 10s. a bushel: ‘it is but justice to say that this money was honestly paid by them.’ It also condemned those farmers reputed to be withholding wheat from the mills in expectation of higher prices and others who ‘attend more to the suggestions of private interest than the distress of their fellow creatures’.⁵³ Moreover, respectable ratepayers, while no doubt alarmed by food riots, were so worried about the monopolistic threat posed to their bread supply by Pickard’s steam mill that in 1796 they established the Birmingham Flour and Bread Company, an enterprise run by a committee of citizens on a cooperative and not-for-profit basis. Its prospectus was entirely moral economic in tone, proposing the establishment of public works, particularly when the profits are restricted to moderate bounds, and those devoted to the service of the inhabitants. It will also enable the baker to pursue his trade with a fair profit; will restrain the inordinate avarice of the miller; and effectively cut off that useless, mischievous lumber, called badgers.
A subscription raised over £6,000 by April 1796, and the Union Mill, a steam-powered mill like that at Snow Hill but run as a public company with a clear constitution, was opened in the summer of 1797. Like the ratepayers of ⁵¹ See, for example, HO 42/35, Legge to Portland, 16 July 1795; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 19 May 1800. ⁵² See, for example, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 12 August 1795 10, 17 February 1800. ⁵³ Ibid., 15, 21 September 1795. The paper also made supportive noises towards a committee against forestalling, engrossing, and regrating established in the town in August 1800. Ibid., 4 August 1800.
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Norwich and Bristol earlier, the respectable classes of dynamic and entrepreneurial Birmingham were not prepared to tolerate their staple food resting in the hands of unregulated large-scale capitalists.⁵⁴ Such views do not suggest a wholesale abandonment of older regulatory assumptions.⁵⁵ Bohstedt’s assumption that we can distinguish the supposedly chaotic patterns of protest in the ‘new’ industrial centres from the ‘classic’ modes of action in ‘older’ manufacturing centres is likewise open to debate. Charlesworth has argued that Bohstedt seriously underestimates the scale and violence of disorder in the ‘revolt of the south-west’ in 1801. Although the course of disturbances in 1795 in the old serge-making towns that extended north from Exeter did follow, in some part, the ‘stately gavotte of ordered food rioting’,⁵⁶ by 1800 these modes of behaviour were proving less effectual. The crowds who toured farms around Totnes threatened to hang any farmer who failed to sign their list of agreed prices. While many local justices turned a blind eye to such activities, at Plymouth Dock serious confrontations broke out when dockyard workers attempted to fix prices and were confronted by the garrison armed with artillery. Here force majeur determined the outcome, not orderly negotiation.⁵⁷ In the Gloucestershire cloth-making region, too, both old and new patterns of crowd behaviour are to be found. Paternalist measures had generally ensured order during 1795 but in 1800 such methods came under extreme pressure. In August numerous rioters intercepted a barge on the canal at Brimscombe and were in the process of loading it onto a commandeered wagon when the Stroud Volunteer infantry were summoned. They seized ‘ringleaders’ and wagon but, on their march home, they were ‘furiously assailed’ with stones all the way into Stroud where pistols were also fired at them. Two Volunteers fired back, wounding three protesters. Angry crowds resumed rioting the next day.⁵⁸ Within a week a new Association to prosecute Forestalling, Ingrossing, and Regrating of Corn had been established at Rodborough.⁵⁹ At Wotton under Edge, workers organized a general strike to enable a mass meeting to consider how to lower the price of wheat. Confronted by the magistrates, ‘they behaved decently, and with coolness . . . but have determined to assemble again in ⁵⁴ A. Langford, A Century of Birmingham Life, 1741–1841 (Birmingham, 1868), ii. 159–61. Aris’s Birmingham Gazette carried a series of letters on the subject in the early months of 1796 before the idea took off. By the spring of 1797 the Union Mill had acquired 14% of the Birmingham market. J. Tann, ‘Co-operative Corn-Milling: Self-help during the Grain Crises of the Napoleonic Wars’, Agricultural History Review, (1980), 28, passim. In 1800 the mill was said to be selling the quartern loaf at 111⁄2 d. as against 151⁄2 d. charged for the same in London. Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 13 January 1800. ⁵⁵ The Birmingham model was taken up elsewhere, including Bath, Manchester, Bristol, Hanley, and Whitby. Wells, Wretched Faces, 326–8. ⁵⁶ Charlesworth, ‘From the Moral Economy of Devon’, 210. ⁵⁷ HO 42/61, Handbill from ‘Totnes Committee of the People’, 3 April 1800; Deposition of Thomas Hookway, 3 April 1800. For an extended account of these riots, see Wells, ‘The Revolt of the South-west’. ⁵⁸ Gloucester Journal, 7 August 1800. ⁵⁹ Significantly, the leading figure behind it was Sir George Paul. GRO, D149 X12, Notice of meeting to establish an ‘Association for carrying into execution The Laws against Forestaling, Ingrossing & Regrating of Corn’. All the leading clothiers immediately subscribed.
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a few days and compel the farmers in the neighbourhood to sell their wheat at a certain rate.’⁶⁰ Despite the magistrates’ best efforts, the woollen workers soon put their plans into force. Large crowds visited several farmers and ‘forced them to sign a written paper that they would sell their corn at ten shillings the bushel’. They carried ‘a halter to hang them with, and had actually begun to put their threats in execution with one farmer that resisted.’⁶¹ Bohstedt’s emphasis on categorizing differing forms of protest by the size and function of community, and in particular upon differentiating between the small to medium-sized manufacturing towns and big industrial boom towns, also tends to overlook one of the most interesting and least explored aspects of the riots of 1795–1801, namely the food riots that broke out with surprising frequency in essentially rural and agrarian villages.⁶² Bohstedt discounts ‘small agrarian villages’ from any riotous tradition and indeed we have noted before that such communities rarely figured in eighteenth-century popular protests. Yet such villages produced, apparently ab initio, a surprisingly mature and purposeful determination to assert moral economic principles upon the food market in these years. In the south-east, not a region to figure prominently in any of the major food rioting disturbances of the century, food riots broke out among populations of ‘country people’ with a hitherto unknown frequency. At Lamberhurst in Kent in January 1795 some forty people assembled at a local mill and accused the miller of causing ‘a great scarcity and a sudden rise in prices in that part of the county’. They demanded that prices must fall. They made the same demand to the gentry who agreed to assist. In February a ‘little MOB OF WOMEN’ attacked a miller’s cart at Sidley Green near Bexley. In April a large crowd of townspeople from Chichester in Sussex, supplemented by a contingent of ‘country people’ and disgruntled soldiers from the Herefordshire militia, who were encamped there as a defence against invasion, attempted to fix prices. They later marched out to a neighbouring village and compelled a prominent farmer to agree to bring grain to market the next day at 5s. a bushel. Similar events took place among country people and townsfolk at Petworth, Horsmonden, and Brenchley, while at Brighton in April some 200 ‘country’ women and girls demonstrated in the market, carrying a loaf and a steak on sticks, which they periodically lowered to symbolize their demands.⁶³ A careful study of the riots in other counties reveals a similar outbreak of riot or popular assemblies among similar populations. In the little north Somerset village ⁶⁰ HO 42/51, Berkeley to Portland, 16 September 1800. ⁶¹ Ibid., 23 September 1800. ⁶² In this assertion he is not alone. As we have noted previously, J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (Longman, 1972, 1992 edn.), 124–5, argues that rural labourers were rarely involved in food riots. There remains the possibility, of course, that such riots did occur in rural villages in the earlier period but left little in the way of records. ⁶³ For details of these riots, see C. G. Griffin, ‘As Lated Tongues Bespoke’: Popular Protest in South-east England 1790–1840 (unpublished Ph.D., University of Bristol, 2002), 146–51.
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of Stogursey, over 100 labourers assembled on 30 March 1801 and marched first to Over Stowey, where they agreed a set of ‘Articles of their Greivances’ and then, gathering, ‘snowball like’, other labourers along the way, marched to Bridgwater, arriving nearly a thousand strong. Their aim was to secure magisterial approval for a list of prices. Defying troops sent to confront them, by nightfall they had won the day. A list of agreed price was published for Bridgwater market and the farmers around were coerced into signing it. There was no precedent for the labourers in this entirely agrarian district behaving in such a manner. Yet numerous other village labourers were in 1801 to do the same.⁶⁴ The case, then, for regarding the food riots of the years from 1795 to 1801 as marking a clear shift from older and politer modes of community politics into more socially dangerous and violent class conflicts is not easily sustained. Certainly there were differences in tone and pattern depending upon local context. Structures and agents varied from place to place and the outcomes of each confrontation was shaped by both. Yet the notable feature from across the country was the surprising commonality exhibited by rioters everywhere. All believed that rapacious farmers and middlemen were exploiting the scarcity.⁶⁵ If there was no one ‘template’ for food riots, most appear on examination to be variations on the old theme rather than brand new models of social action polarized along class lines. If there are reasons to question Bohstedt’s reading of the changing character of food riots in this period, we may also question Thompson’s argument that the context of food rioting in 1795–1801 was decisively changed by ‘the acute anti-Jacobinism of the gentry’. There can of course be no doubting the hostility of the landed, and most of the propertied classes, across the country towards the supposed threat posed to the state by radicals and revolutionaries in the years after the publication of the Rights of Man. However, while there was undoubtedly a fear of ‘reds under the bed’, the questions as to how far popular disorder in this period was indeed tainted by radicalism or how far the authorities really believed radicals were responsible for such disturbances remain open ones. Certainly there is evidence that the radicals sought to make use of popular discontents. The war against revolutionary France, commenced in January 1793, meant that ‘Jacobinism’ could easily be equated with support for a powerful and dangerous external enemy. However, mounting popular anger over the rising cost of living provided the radicals with an opportunity to make converts. The London Corresponding Society, starting 1795 somewhat in the doldrums, certainly made use of the rapidly rising cost of food as a means to generate supporter when it ⁶⁴ Somerset RO, DD/AH, Acland Mss., George Strong to Acland, 30 March 1801; Evered to Acland, March 31 1801; D. Davis to Acland, 1 April 1801. The participation of ‘purely’ agricultural workers in the disturbances of 1795–1801 remains significantly under-researched. ⁶⁵ The minister of Colne noted, ‘As long as they conceived the scarcity to be real, they bore their privations with almost stoic patience and fortitude.’ HO 42/53, Hartley to Home Office, November 1800, cited in Booth, ‘Food Riots in North-west England’, 91.
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innovatively shifted from alehouse debates to large-scale outdoor platform meetings in the later summer of 1795. Speakers emphasized the growing impoverishment of the working people, linking it to their lack of political rights, while among the crowds who jostled the King’s coach on his way to open Parliament in October were people carrying small loaves on sticks decorated with black crepe.⁶⁶ The symbolism, evoking fears of a repetition of events in Paris in 1789, was not missed. In the provinces too, radicals were making something of a come back in 1795 and were sometimes seen as being complicit in the provincial food riots which broke out that summer. In Birmingham in 1795 radical handbills, proclaiming ‘To arms, fellow townsmen, and resist the cruel oppressions of your wicked rulers, whose intentions are to starve you to death’, were stuck up around the town on the evening following the attack on Pickard’s mill.⁶⁷ From Gloucestershire, Sir George Paul reported that radicals were making use of ‘the cry of a want of bread’. This, he warned, ‘forms a body of insurgents, and amongst these are mixed a number of seditious persons whose business it is to excite the number to mischief and make them deaf to reason. . . . Sedition will take the advantage of acting on an empty stomach.’⁶⁸ In the small village of Uley a series of threatening letters about the rising cost of food alarmed magistrates: O remember ye poor in distress by ye high price of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishes round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a family by 41⁄2 flour for a shilling . . . no king but a constitution, down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.
When handbills called a public meeting on Hampton Common, magistrates attended with a large military force. However, while 300 people attended, ‘it plainly appeared they had no appointed leader and concerted plan’ and the meeting dispersed quietly.⁶⁹ At Bristol inflammatory handbills linking food prices with revolutionary slogans were increasingly distributed.⁷⁰ But, though taken seriously, in the main the authorities nationally in 1795–6 did not fear a direct tie-up between radicalism and riot. By 1800, however, the context had changed and the rhetoric of radicalism was routinely added to threats over food prices. Wells notes that such handbills and posters linking radical demands for reform with criticism of the causes of high food costs now ‘flooded the streets, notably during disturbances’.⁷¹ The growth of the United Englishmen in Lancashire and Yorkshire was alarming authorities both there and in London. From Saddleworth an anonymous correspondent warned in March: for a considerable time past a number of seditious people have been and are now employed in the northern counties administering the United Englishmens oath to the lower ⁶⁶ E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz, 1963; Penguin, 1968), 153–4, 157–8. ⁶⁷ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 29 June 1795. ⁶⁸ WO 1/1091, Paul to War Office, 7 August 1795. ⁶⁹ HO 42/36, Lloyd-Baker to Portland, October 1795. ⁷⁰ WO 1/1092, Rooke to Windham, 13 November 1795. ⁷¹ Wells, Wretched Faces, 144.
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populace—and unless the govt immediately puts a stop to it and oblige the farmers to bring their corn to market and sell it at a lower price instead of hoarding it up, it is probable that a Rebellion will break out.
He noted, ‘they will not bear the present high price of provisions any longer.’⁷² In Lancashire, some magistrates now feared that radicals were thoroughly mixed up in food riots. Reverend Prescot warned that such a correlation ‘may do more mischief than it will be in their power to stop or prevent’,⁷³ while at Bolton magistrates worried that Jacobins were behind the riots there. ‘There is a spirit of dissatisfaction more generally diffused than at any known period and the coalition between Jacobinism and Distress is really alarming.’⁷⁴ The leading Manchester magistrate, T. B. Bayley, noted that walls in the town were regularly chalked with slogans of sedition: ‘Whether the subject regards bread or peace NO KING introduces it.’⁷⁵ Across the Pennines, some justices were equally concerned. A correspondent warned Fitzwilliam in March 1801, ‘there are persons going about to endeavour to persuade the people to take an oath to support each other in regulating and lowering the price of all necessaries of life. Their proceedings are very secret.’ He noted that, since ‘the general distress is so great’, there was every prospect of the radicals securing a large support. This view was echoed in April by another writer who noted, ‘the very high price of provisions and a stagnation . . . of trade’ were creating disaffection while ‘the Jacobins do not fail to avail themselves of the opportunity of working on the feelings of the lower classes’. J. R. Busfield likewise warned Fitzwilliam that he had heard of a meeting of the ‘Friends of Liberty’ on be held on Steeton Moor to ‘take into consideration the exorbitant price of provision’ along with the evils of hereditary government and taxation.⁷⁶ The south of England likewise saw a profusion of radical rhetoric connected with rocketing food costs. From Banbury came information of handbills proclaiming ‘Cheap Bread or No king’ while from Ramsbury in Wiltshire came a letter that called upon ‘Dear Brother Britons North and South younite your selves in one Body and Stand true. Down with your Luxzuraras Government both spiritual and temporal or you starve with hunger.’ It ended, ‘God save the Poor and down with George III.’⁷⁷ In Bath, where a string of attacks on brewers and dealers culminated in the destruction of a granary, handbills proclaiming ‘Peace and a Large bread or a King without a Head’ were stuck up.⁷⁸ And at Windsor, appropriately: Notice is hereby Given to George III and all his Tiranical Crew That Unless we the starving Poor have Bread at 6d Quarter loaf Meat 4d pound and no Taxes He May Expect No less ⁷² HO 42/49, Anon to Eldon, 31 March 1800. ⁷³ HO 42/51, Prescot to Portland, 25 September 1800. ⁷⁴ HO 42/52, Bancroft to King, 18 November 1800. ⁷⁵ HO 42/53, Bayley to Portland, 30 November 1800. ⁷⁶ Wentworth Woodhouse Mss., F45/9, Gowder to Fitzwilliam, 31 March 1801; F45/11, Frank to Cooke, 9 April 1800; F45/12, Busfield to Fitzwilliam, 12 April 1801. ⁷⁷ HO 42/49 1800 April 1800; HO 42/50, Meyrick to Secretary of State, 12 June 1800. ⁷⁸ HO 42/53, Information of William Hunt and Thomas Allen, 11 November 1800.
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than Be Shot—all Farmers upholders of Corn Their Farms Burnt and Take the Hint—So shall it Be—for We Value not our own Lives to rid the Earth of Tirants.⁷⁹
That there were linkages between the food riots and radicals, therefore, is clear. However, it remains a matter of conjecture as to how deep the connections really ran. In 1795 the leadership of the London Corresponding Society was deeply divided over whether to cultivate popular clamour over food prices, while Norwich radicals feared being tainted by food rioting, arguing that it was the war that was the cause of popular misery: ‘The Ministers’ objective is to hold up to popular odium the farmers, millers, bakers etc. A few there may be foolish enough to withhold their goods from market. . . . But why condemn the whole for a part?’ The real villain of the piece was the government: ‘Pitt would gladly instigate you to riot and plunder: this would accelerate his darling object of governing us by a military aristocracy.’⁸⁰ S. Garnett had a conspiracy theory from the opposite end of the political spectrum. He wrote from Hilperton in 1795 to inform the government that ‘the present scarcity of provisions is not occasioned by real want . . . but that the corn etc is bought up by our rascally English Jacobins and hid on purpose to starve the people into a Rebellion against Government.’⁸¹ In truth, rioters did not need radicals to tell them that food prices were unreasonably high nor did they need a political dimension in order to make sense of the shortages in the market. Like the gentlemen and respectable classes, they garnered their news from the press, from gossip, and from intimate knowledge of the market mechanisms that had supplied their daily needs for decades. They had their grand narrative ready composed. Radicals might gain converts from the disaffection created by chronic food shortages, but their role remained at best secondary. The crowd still mobilized and acted as they had done in such circumstances previously, and the authorities did the same. Radical threats on handbills served a purpose: they worried the authorities. Where ‘bread or blood’ had once set magisterial nerves on edge, ‘cheap bread and no King’ now served the purpose even better. If fears of revolution assisted the imposition of controls on dealers or lowered prices, there was no reason not to use them. But they did not indicate a politicization of food protests. For their part, while magistrates recognized the danger of food riots developing a political dimension, this may also have encouraged them to revert to older patterns of conciliation and intervention in the marketplace. The justices realized that the best defence against Jacobins lay in demonstrations that the paternal model still could be invoked and, once implemented, provide real alleviation. This is one reason magistrates were inclined to ignore the ministry’s demands that they leave the market free to supply, or not, its customers. Intervention made ⁷⁹ HO 42/55, Notice, undated (December? 1800). ⁸⁰ Cited in Wells, Wretched Faces, 139. ⁸¹ HO 42/35, Garnett to Portland, 18 July 1795.
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political sense. This was recognized by the Oldham magistracy in August 1795. Rowbottom noted: Sir Watts Horton and Mr picford Called a Meetin and remonsterated with the Badgers when Sir Wats proved him Self warm Advocate to the poor and the Badgers agreed to sell Meal at Two Shillins per peck for 3 weeks Next ensueing . . . Sir Watts Horton Gained the Love and the Esteem of all Ranks of people and by his Judicious Judgement and unexampled wisdom it was owing that pease and Happiness being happily restored and that the Same Lamentable Misfortunes did not take place as took place in Rochdale.⁸²
The dangers of Jacobin insurrection notwithstanding, many magistrates recognized that social cohesion could best be preserved by implementing the moral economy, or, at least, being seen to attempt it. If the actions and the attitudes of the crowd and the justices do not indicate a major sea change, there is, however, one area where a real shift can most certainly be identified. That is in the attitudes and actions of the government. It is clear that the ministry, and especially the Duke of Portland in the Home Office, throughout the crisis took a clearer and much more ideologically mounted stance than had any of its predecessors when confronted with extensive disorder. Portland had no sympathy whatsoever with those magistrates who sought to uphold the older moral economy by regulating markets or by using their influence to press farmers into supplying markets. He sharply criticized the Oxford authorities who had argued in 1800 that there was no need ‘for the presence of regular Soldiery’ in the city, despite recent riots, because they were actively tackling ‘what they conceive to be one of the principal causes of the dearness, the offences of forestalling, ingrossing and regrating’. The town clerk, who had excused the actions of a crowd who had set the price in the butter market, actions which Portland condemned as ‘a violent and unjustified attack on property’, drew not only direct censure. Portland sought, unsuccessfully, to have him dismissed.⁸³ Portland also directly chastised the Cornish justices who had coerced local farmers to market food at affordable prices: such actions ‘cannot in the nature of things be justified’ since ‘it necessarily prevents the Employment of Capital in the Farming Line’.⁸⁴ Such direct and systematic condemnation of the bench was certainly new. As noted earlier, central government since the Hanoverian succession had been very cautious about being seen to interfere too openly in the local affairs or to challenge the autonomy of the bench. In part this change reflected the grave sense of political crisis that the war with revolutionary France engendered in the minds of those in power nationally. But it also reflected the ideological conversion of Pitt’s ministry to the ideas of political economy. ⁸² Rowbottom Diaries, 6 August 1795. ⁸³ WO 40/17, Taunton to War Office, 6 September 1800; HO 43/12, King to Taunton, 8 September 1800. Taunton had written to complain to the War Office of the city’s ‘surprise that a military body of horse soldiers should have made their appearance early this morning’. For the role of Oxford’s authorities in food riots, see Thwaites, ‘Oxford Food Riots’, 137–62. ⁸⁴ HO 43/13, Portland to Edgcumbe, 25 April 1801.
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Central government could afford to insist upon a vigorous and determined resistance to the mob. Yet the local authorities found themselves, as usual, trapped between the Scylla of property protection, demanded by the state, and the Charybdis of moral economic expectation, backed up by raw, and immediate, crowd power. Although many gentlemen no doubt shared Portland’s views as to the need to facilitate ‘the Employment of Capital in the Farming Line’ (as landlords they were real beneficiaries from the rapidly rising profitability of agrarian production), they also knew that their standing and authority within their communities could not permanently be sustained by the brute force of military power. Indeed, that military power was itself a two-edged weapon. The new barracks to be found in towns like Birmingham marked a deliberate policy to concentrate military resources in turbulent towns both to ensure rapid deployment and to prevent easy social fraternization of soldiers with the mob, something that the old system of billeting troops in inns encouraged. But they were not popular. While the regular army were usually to be relied upon, even this was not entirely the case. General Rooke, defending Bristol in 1801, received a note warning that, unless prices were reduced to those of 1790, his soldiers would ‘lay down our arms, and scour the country, & hang up a farmer in every parish’ rather than ‘see the people at large starve in a plentiful country’. Rooke doubted that the letter came from one of his men (‘they have no such ideas as the letter contains’), but men of the 112th Regiment certainly led the riots at Wells in 1795.⁸⁵ The enrolled militia proved less than reliable. Four men charged in Bristol in 1801 with riot were in the Monmouth and Brecon militia, while the militia supposedly protecting the Sussex and Kentish coast were often suspected, with reason, of complicity in food riots. For example, men of the West Sussex militia and the Herefordshire militia took part in riots at Chichester and Chatham in March and April 1795, respectively, while men of the South Hampshire militia led price-setting activities in Canterbury. At Seaford, the Oxfordshire militia mutinied and led major food riots in the area.⁸⁶ Growing fears of invasion augmented the forces of coercion. Thus in 1800 the Birmingham authorities were able to call upon the new Warwickshire Yeomanry, the Birmingham Light Horse, and the Loyal Association, none of which had existed in 1795. In earlier crises, as we have noted, wealthier ratepayers had not always been prepared to defend the property of their fellow townsmen from the mob. Now, fully armed if only partially trained, such groups significantly augmented peace enforcement. Yet they brought with them risks. The Gloucestershire authorities were concerned by the volunteer infantry corps established by some clothiers at the height of an invasion panic. Although assured that the one at Wotton-under-Edge was formed to ‘keep the peace at home at the ⁸⁵ HO 42/61, Rooke to Addington?, 17 March 1801. ⁸⁶ Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, 1 April 1801; for the role of militia in Sussex and Kent, see Griffin, ‘As Lated Tongues Bespoke’, 149–51; Wells, Wretched Faces, 100–4.
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time the army might be all removed’, Sir George Paul feared the consequences ‘if too many should get under arms and no enemy appear’.⁸⁷ An anonymous correspondent from Taunton warned: it is highly impolitic Volunteer infantry should exist, in the first place can it be supposed they could divest themselves of all sensibility & point the bayonet against their nearest relatives, but it is more than probable that they would . . . be prompted by the same opinion that madly and unthinkingly promoted the tumult.
Mounted volunteer forces were unlikely to riot, given their superior social status, but they might conversely be only too ready to use lethal force when protecting local property. This point was raised by the Taunton correspondent: ‘the yeoman cavalry as possessed of property & others under the control of their landlords might be fully depended upon, but their discipline should be regularly & more rigidly attended to.’ The experience at Rochdale in 1795 showed how easily such confrontations could lead to major social fracture and pointed towards the more notorious events of 16 August 1819 in Manchester.⁸⁸ In these circumstances it is therefore little wonder that, when faced with extensive yet in many ways familiar food riots, local justices responded with tried and tested mechanisms. We can view this as simple pragmatism. Yet such a response was not necessarily disingenuous. Many, perhaps most, justices remained reluctant to employ lethal force against food rioters because they had real sympathy with their cause. They did not share the views of the ministry that free markets would solve all ills. Indeed, they frequently, like the crowd, assumed that ‘free’ markets were the cause of the ills. This was certainly the case in 1795 when, along with most commentators, many on the bench clearly believed that the acute shortages in the market resulted not from harvest deficiency but from deliberate market manipulation by dealers and large farmers. To take just a few examples, when the food riots broke out in Gloucestershire in1795, almost all on the bench were concerned to be seen as placatory as possible. George Paul, a leading paternalist, blamed farmers and dealers for the rising cost of corn, noting that his duty to oppose disturbances grated with his view that ‘these cruel speculations’, which were ‘inconsistent with the spirit of a Free Trade’, ⁸⁷ HO 50/41, Austin to Berkeley, 17 March 1798; Paul to Dundas(?), 27 April 1798. ⁸⁸ HO 42/61, Anon to Portland, 9 April 1801; WO 1/1090, Drake to War Office, 3 August 1795. There seems to have been no attempt to fire warning shots: ‘Doctor Drake (Vicar of Rochdale and a Majestrate) ordered the Rochdale Fenciables Commanded by John Entwisle of Foxholes to fire wich fataly Kild Two Aged men and wounded another man in the Leg and several had a hairs breadth Escape.’ Rowbottom Diaries, 3 August 1795. Booth, ‘Food Riots in North-west England’, 100, cites a piece of doggerel which ran: In 1795 a dearth of bread there were And people cried for bread, The chiefest shepherd of the flock He feedeth them with lead.
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were the real cause of genuine want.⁸⁹ The justices of Whitehaven in 1800 likewise clearly blamed the middlemen who were denuding markets of food: We are willing to do our duty as magistrates upon this and every other occasion, but at the same time cannot help observing, that where the necessaries of life are at such high prices . . . we cannot wonder that the people should take umbrage at their being sent off to any other place.⁹⁰
The tough Staffordshire clerical magistrate, Alexander Haden, had little sympathy for plebeian interventions in the market, but warned in 1800 that the poor are almost shut out from the possibility of procuring the common necessaries of life. . . . Want of employ and the very shameful and exorbitant price of corn have brought them to utmost distress: so that unless some restraint can be laid upon the farmer and miller it will be impossible to preserve the public peace.
Six days later he wrote again, bitterly noting that he found himself protecting the ‘enriching of one part of the community & supporting them in the most glaring act of oppression at the expense of the comforts, happiness & even the existence of the other’.⁹¹ Magistrates were even sometimes the abettors of riot. Justice Rushworth, failing to persuade an Isle of Wight corn miller and baker to lower his prices, threatened before the man’s house to send the constables ‘to search his mill for adulterated flour’. An assembled crowd needed no further encouragement, set upon the miller, and nearly lynched him.⁹² And, indeed, a Somerset justice was formally tried at the assizes for his alleged inaction when faced with a riot at Somerton in 1795 where ‘a few clamorous women had assembled . . . with an intent to stop a load of corn passing through that town’. Donisthorpe, a magistrate who also captained a troop of volunteer infantry, was accused of ‘refusing to assist in quelling the alledged riot, and with having rather encouraged it’.⁹³ If few magistrates were willing to abet riot, many believed that the crowd had rough justice on their side and were, as was the town clerk of Oxford, prepared to turn a blind eye to price setting. In this, the justices were merely reflecting the views of wider respectable society, a view articulated strongly in the regional press, which of course shaped both popular and gentry understanding of the unfolding crisis.⁹⁴ The liberal Bath Journal may serve as an example. In May 1795 it reported positively on the regular forays by market officials in Frome and Bath to check up on weights and measures and welcomed news ‘that our corporation will shortly enforce the power given them by their charter, of regulating the market, and preventing the shameful ⁸⁹ PC 1/29 A64, Paul to Privy Council, 7 August 1795. ⁹⁰ HO 42/61, Hudleston and Sergeant to Portland, 18 January 1800. ⁹¹ HO 42/50, Haden to Portland, 10, 16 June 1795. ⁹² Wells, Wretched Faces, 83. ⁹³ Bath Journal, 8 August 1796. He was defended by Erskine, but found guilty. ⁹⁴ Wells notes, ‘Reports were constantly confident and optimistic and invariably predicted good harvest yields much too early in the season.’ Wells, Wretched Faces, 77.
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regrating and forestalling, now practiced with impunity.’ It praised the establishment of a ‘Provisions Committee’ and publicized its view, based upon ‘the most authentic information’, that ‘the present high price of corn’ was not ‘owing to a real scarcity’ but the result of many ‘farmers withholding their stock from motives of avarice’. When rumours that the 1796 crop was under threat from insects, due to the mild winter, the Journal warned against giving the story any credence. ‘The only vermin we could wish for the means of extirpating from the surface of the earth are the very speculators.’ Later it noted that ‘that there does not exist any real scarcity of wheat in the country’ since there was plenty of old wheat still in store. However, it warned that stocks were ‘withheld from the markets, on account of the Badgers, and Jobbers in corn making it a common practice to call on the farmers at home, and who, being mere speculators, are often induced to offer, and give, prices, that have a very pernicious effect on the fair market’. The examples of Gloucester and Durham, where quarter session had seen extensive prosecutions of forestallers, were commended. In July 1800 a correspondent noted that ‘A society is forming in Bristol for the very laudable purpose of prosecuting forestallers and regrators’ and urged ‘the propriety and necessity of establishing a similar institution in this city, and in every town throughout the country’. And when a wealthy farmer near Minehead suffered major losses from arson attacks, the paper reminded its readers that the same man was ‘a considerable corn dealer’ who had earlier lost a large consignment of corn destined for Wales when the vessel transporting it had been scuttled in Minehead Quay.⁹⁵ Bath had a long history of regulating markets. Heavily dependent upon supplies from the neighbouring countryside and having a large population of assertive artisans, the ‘theatre’ of market regulation clearly made political common sense. Yet in nearby Bristol, the second largest city in the country at the start of the century and one in which commerce held all the strings of power, the pattern was the same. Although, as noted earlier, in 1753 the city corporation had sought to use heavy coercive force to resist popular demands for regulation, thereafter they responded to food shortages with interventionist strategies justified by essentially paternalistic ideology. Thus, when the actions of the Dean miners effectively blockaded the port in 1795, the corporation pressed for governmental assistance and then used corporate resources to purchase grain, which it supplied only to local millers. Here too the press was firmly of the view that shortages were caused by or compounded by market manipulation. The Bristol Gazette demanded the arrest of all hucksters in June 1795 and blamed the ‘exorbitant’ price of beef on the butchers. Two days later riots broke out in the meat market. The Bristol Mercury ⁹⁵ Bath Journal, 25, 18 May, 27 July 1795; 25 January, 8 February, 2 January 1796; 21, 28 July 1800. Other regional newspapers reported developments throughout the crisis in similar tones. Indeed, finding newpapers opposed to regulation, even in centres where one might expect that the readership would have been more firmly in favour of the free market, is by no means a simple matter, since all recognized that advocacy of complete deregulation at a time when large dealers held the whip hand was unlikely to find favour even with the better-off consumer.
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blamed illicit wartime trading with France for the shortage of flour in January 1795 while the Journal asserted in November that, in view of ‘the abundance of potatoes that have been grown this year, the public will see that there are no just grounds for advancing their price and will accordingly resist any such attempt’.⁹⁶ As Steven Poole has shown, consumer boycotts by the respectable consumers proved a powerful agency upon local dealers and demonstrated that, even in an avowedly free-trading city, popular and respectable opinion alike shared the view that food markets might not be left simply to the marketers to manage.⁹⁷ If respectable attitudes did not on the whole differ from those in earlier food crises, the crises of supply in 1795–1801 did, however, sharply expose changes that had, over a long period, been taking place in the marketing of foodstuffs. With enclosures, better turnpikes, and the new canals, grains and other foods were now regularly moving around the country on a far greater scale than ever before. These changes, unremarked in times of surplus, were now starkly exposed. The Vicar of Leigh noted that The farmers of this district twenty years ago were accustomed to take their corn to market. But this custom has for the last ten or twelve years been wholly discontinued. It is now sold by sample to the corn factor, the regular flourman or the miller-flourman; for the millers have, most of them, joined the occupation to their own.⁹⁸
Similar changes had happened in other markets. A West Country correspondent, signing himself ‘a staunch friend to Government and the poor’, noted: I know the farmers have been thought the persons to blame, but the millers and mealmen (who are one and the same) offer so good a price that the temptation cannot be resisted. And though the corn is brought to market, the price (too high for common pockets) is settled beforehand by private sample.⁹⁹
But it was only when shortages occurred that the consumer began to look askance at the loss of the old pitching market, set down in the old statutes. Many justices were embarrassed to find that the old ways had fallen, through their neglect, into desuetude. They were not alone. One very significant law officer was likewise appalled by the collapse of regulation in the food market. Lord Chief Justice Kenyon, as Douglas Hay has shown, did not share the view that just because Parliament had abolished the old statutes in 1772, the crimes of forestalling, engrossing, and regrating had ceased to be illegal. He remained adamant that these actions remained punishable under the common law and should be pursued with vigour.¹⁰⁰ His opinions, ⁹⁶ Bristol Gazette, 4, 11 June 1795; Bristol Mercury, 19 January 1795; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 7 November 1795. ⁹⁷ Poole, ‘Scarcity and the Civic Tradition’. ⁹⁸ HO 42/53, Barker to Home Office, 17 November 1800, cited in Booth, ‘Food Riots in Northwest England’, 92. ⁹⁹ Bath Journal, 10 March 1800. ¹⁰⁰ Kenyon, giving judgment in 1800, stated, ‘Undoubtedly it would have been better if that statute [against forestalling and regrating] had not been repealed. It is well the extent of the design in repeal was not carried up to affect the common law of the land:—I wish the old statute to be
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expressed in 1790, contrasted with those of the ministry but caused little difficulty until the crisis of 1795. Then they became a potent source of political embarrassment for the government. Kenyon’s intervention in August 1795 followed the efforts of some local authorities to test the law. For example, in July the Oxford authorities threatened that anyone found transgressing the old laws would be prosecuted, while in Birmingham, following the riots noted earlier, the High Sheriff announced that there too prosecutions would be commenced against all forestallers and regraters. Thomas Pownall and Joseph Girdler, a Kentish gentleman, both launched one-man campaigns against forestallers, publishing pamphlets, handbills, and letters in the press around the country. These actions brought to the fore the question of the illegality, or not, of much that now was normal practice in the grain market.¹⁰¹ Addressing the Shropshire grand jury at the start of the assizes in August 1795, Kenyon made his views crystal clear: Gentlemen, since I have been in this place, a report has been handed to me . . . that a set of private individuals are plundering at the expense of public happiness, by endeavouring in this county, to purchase the grain now growing in the soil! . . . Gentlemen, you ought to be the champions against this hydra-headed monster. It is your duty, as Justices, to see justice done in your country! In your respective districts, as watchmen, be on your guard.
Given such a clear signal, the Shropshire bench immediately set about enforcing the old market legislation.¹⁰² The neighbouring Staffordshire bench determined to police the previously unregulated market at Wolverhampton, appointing a clerk charged with regular inspection of weights and measures. They followed this up by publishing their intention to prosecute all forestallers, regraters, and engrossers throughout the county.¹⁰³ In so doing, both sets of justices were indicating in a very public way whom they thought responsible for
re-enacted.’ Quoted in Dugald Stewart, Lectures on Political Economy, in Sir W. Hamilton (ed.), The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart (Edinburgh, 1856), xi. 90. For a definitive examination of the ways in which law was defined and utilized by Kenyon as an instrument to reinvigorate moral economic imperatives, see D. Hay, ‘Moral Economy, Political Economy and Law’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Conflict, Crowds and Authority (Macmillan, 2000), 93–122, and also Hay, ‘The State and the Market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington’, Past and Present, c (1999), 101–62. ¹⁰¹ Thwaites, ‘Oxford Food Riots’, 152; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 6 July 1795; T. Pownall, Considerations on the Scarcity and High Prices of Bread, Corn and Bread at the Market (1795); Girdler made extensive use of the press and subsequently published a lengthy pamphlet, demanding a return to regulated food markets: J. S. Girdler, Observations on the Pernicious Consequences of Forestalling, Regrating and Ingrossing (1800). ¹⁰² Shrewsbury Chronicle, 7 August 1795, cited in Hay, ‘Moral Economy, Political Economy and Law’, 105–6. ¹⁰³ Staffordshire CRO, Q/SB/ Michaelmas 1795. In Birmingham, an association to support the Bailiff to prosecute those who sought to break market regulations was established: Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 7, 14, 28 September.
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the shortages. But Kenyon’s views had a resonance well beyond the West Midlands. They were eagerly reprinted in many provincial papers and served as a powerful confirmation of old moral economic attitudes generally.¹⁰⁴ As Hay notes, these views were anathema to the advocates of political economy who insisted that any interference in the free market was both morally and economically wrong and would inevitably prove counterproductive. Burke in particular launched a broadside against the old notions of regulation, praising ‘the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God’.¹⁰⁵ Such a view turned on its head the moral imperative of Natural Law, directly challenging the value system that for generations had underpinned the paternalist justification for the social order. Pitt and many, though by no means all, in his cabinet shared Burke’s attitude.¹⁰⁶ Yet while the theories of Dr Smith were making headway in metropolitan and provincial salons, such views, in the midst of a famine, smacked to many traditionalist gentlemen of religious, and political, heresy. In this climate Kenyon looked for a test case to re-establish ‘a modern authoritative precedent by a judgment after full argument by counsel and encourage prosecutions through the most public discussion of the grounds of that judgment’. Two cases in 1800 offered this opportunity. One had been brought by the London brewers and hop factors against a wealthy London merchant, Samuel Waddington, who had recently entered the hop trade and made clear his intention of ramping up the price. The other was against a London corn factor, John Rusby, who was charged with regrating and forestalling the grain market at Mark Lane. Both cases came up before Kenyon at the King’s Bench to decide whether there were charges at law to answer. As Hay notes, ‘technical law did not figure greatly in these trials. . . . It was really Adam Smith who was on trial.’ With Kenyon firmly pointing the jury in the direction of ‘traditional beliefs surrounding the moral economy’, political economy was roundly defeated.¹⁰⁷ The judgments were widely welcomed around the country. ‘Publicus’, a correspondent to the Bath Journal, remembered his ‘astonishment’ when the old laws had been repealed, but, like a good citizen, I submitted my judgement to my superiors. But the time is come, Mr Printer, when very high legal authority expresses the same sentiment with which I was ¹⁰⁴ For example, see Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 10 August 1795; Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 13 August 1795. In 1801 the military commander in the south-west, General Simcoe, reported that all the gentry agreed with and praised Kenyon: HO 42/61, Simcoe to Portland, 27 March 1801. ¹⁰⁵ E. Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (London, 1800), 22. The pamphlet was written as a memorandum to the ministry in 1795 but not published until after his death. Richard Sheldon describes it as ‘a frenzied polemic against any ideas of state intervention on behalf of the poor.’ R. Sheldon, The Politics of Bread in Eighteenth-Century England: Debating the Subsistence Question (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1999), 312. ¹⁰⁶ While Pitt, like Portland, was a convert to political economy, others such as Liverpool were know to be sceptical. See Hay, ‘The State and the Market in 1800’, 111–12. On the debates within government over provisions policy, see Wells, Wretched Faces, ch. 11. ¹⁰⁷ Hay, ‘Moral Economy, Political Economy and Law’, 107, 108.
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then impressed, and has called it an evil hour in which the act was repealed. I rejoice to see that in the metropolis and its vicinity 3 prosecutions have been . . . carried into effect against two butcher forestallers, and one corn regrator.¹⁰⁸
However, the subsequent trial and conviction of Rusby before the King’s Bench in July had unforeseen consequences. Kenyon, hearing the case again, had denounced those who sought to monopolize the capital’s food supply.¹⁰⁹ In the context of still-rising prices, this injunction struck deep chords. Thus, when in September the London ‘mob’ began to attack dealers in the corn market, they soon targeted Rusby’s house, as noted earlier.¹¹⁰ Respectable opinion in the capital, perhaps mindful of what had happened in 1780, began to draw back from support of Kenyon’s campaign, while the ministry seethed with anger. As Hay notes, this marked the beginning of the end for his crusade. Kenyon continued to assert the primacy of market regulation. For example, when the bakers of Bath brought an action at the King’s Bench for a Mandamus against the regulatory controls imposed by the fiercely regulatory mayor and corporation, he contemptuously dismissed it: ‘There is no ground upon earth to charge the mayor and justices with improper conduct towards the bakers, and I scout the idea of the assize of bread being set according to the price of grain in the Bath market; or that Bristol is not a fit place from whence to have returns made.’¹¹¹ However, although Waddington was eventually sentenced in February 1801 to serve four months’ imprisonment and fined a massive £1,000, division now broke out among the judges as to how far the offence of regrating might be still deemed extant. When Kenyon died the following year and was replaced by Ellenborough, a committed advocate of political economy, this last gasp of the legal system to sustain the old laws in their pomp finally expired.¹¹² The legal tussle between Kenyon and the ministry should alert us to two important points in considering the question as to whether the food riots of the years from 1795 to 1801 marked the repudiation of the moral economy. The first is that Kenyon, though very much an establishment figure, was articulating a moral economic view shared by the great majority of his countrymen and women. Like him, they believed in the moral imperatives of the old regulatory system. It is, therefore, hard to agree with Thompson that food riots of 1795–1801 witnessed ‘the triumph of the new ideology of political economy’. If we regard the events of those years as a battle of ideologies, the ideology of the free market clearly failed to win hearts and minds, if wider society is considered. Gentlemen, justices, both urban and rural, the press, middling sort consumers, and the labouring poor alike ¹⁰⁸ Bath Journal, 19 July 1800. ¹⁰⁹ The Times, 5 July 1800, reported Kenyon warning, ‘Suppose a rich man were to be placed at every avenue to this town, who was to purchase up every article of provisions . . . what, in that case, would become of the poor consumer?’ ¹¹⁰ See, p. 216. ¹¹¹ Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, 27 January 1801. Significantly, the counsel for the mayor was Thomas Erskine, who had secured the judgment against Waddington before the King’s Bench. ¹¹² Hay, ‘Moral Economy, Political Economy and Law’, 110–11.
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demonstrated that, in a crisis, they reverted to the old moral economy. The old ways of thinking remained firmly rooted. The more that Burke denounced Natural Law, the further from reality the ideology he spouted seemed. However, the crises of those years undermined all ideology, as Roger Wells argues. Faced with the realities of near-famine, Pitt and his government were forced to recognize that free market solutions were no solutions at all. However much the disciples of Dr Smith might argue that the ‘hidden hand’ of the market would solve the ‘temporary’ problem of short supply, the political reality of the consequences of a starving and militant populace impelled governmental action. The alternative, advocated by Burke and then by Malthus, was the abandonment of the social contract between rulers and ruled on which so much of the legitimation of the state depended. Early attempts to avoid intervention, as by compelling the poor to abandon their expensive dietary addiction to fine wheaten bread, foundered on consumer resistance and the recognition that alternative breads necessitated other foods to make them palatable. The ministry was in consequence increasingly compelled to intervene in the grain market, both nationally and internationally, while political prudence meant that the grain supply to the capital had to be kept open, at whatever costs elsewhere. However, advocates of the old moral economy like Kenyon were equally forced to recognize that, in a situation of extreme dearth, regulation could achieve only so much. If there were insufficient foodstuffs to go around, then no regulatory model could make more. Although gentlemen might compel their tenants to release food onto the markets, once that was gone the situation might be even worse. This revelation was to prove the most powerful argument against the old ideology. Much more significantly, the failure of Kenyon’s attempt to mobilize the ‘watchmen’ into successful regulatory action demonstrated that the instrumental power of the justices was now far less potent than they had long assumed. The subsistence crises showed that the new national market, and its agents, were now actually far more powerful than the gentry, perhaps far more powerful than the state. The riots of 1795–1801 revealed the impotence of the local authorities. While they had, on the one hand, now acquired new forces with which to quell disorder, their power to coerce dealers, farmers and middlemen proved to be enfeebled. As shortages struck, the large farmers and dealers were shown to hold all the cards. In the first crisis many justices and gentry had been able, if only for a time, to pressurize the farmers into foregoing their very real market advantage by dint of their social and political influence. However, by the second crisis it had become apparent that the market had now assumed dominance. The case of the farmers around the Somerset village of Stogursey in 1801 is exemplary. Here, following the polite revolt of the labourers, the leading justice and his fellow magistrates reasserted paternal authority and brought the farmers into line, getting them to sign an agreement to supply local markets at affordable prices. Yet once the farmers found that the military would be brought in, they immediately reneged
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upon the agreement and prices resumed their upward trajectory.¹¹³ Likewise, larger dealers came to realize that they could assume far more control of the markets the longer the crises lasted. This can be seen in the way in which they learned from their mistake in releasing large quantities of the imported stocks onto the market in the spring of 1796. When similar circumstances obtained in 1801, they made sure the prices were kept up for as long as possible.¹¹⁴ This experience, more than any ideological struggle or fear of Jacobins, demonstrated the fracturing of the old moral economy. The crowd, and most justices, remained convinced that market manipulation was exacerbating their plight and demanded action. The micropolitics of the moral economy, however, depended upon the justices being able to deliver. The crisis of 1795 indicated that the justices’ instrumental power in the market had greatly waned. Had the crisis of that year been followed by a period of relative calm, such indications might have been ignored or overlooked. However, the almost immediate return to crisis, and to a far deeper crisis, in 1800 exposed the inability of the gentlemen to uphold their side of the moral economy, Lord Kenyon’s efforts notwithstanding. This was to have major ramifications for social relations in the decade which followed when the problems of food supply were superseded by an issue that struck deep into the moral economic attitudes of industrial workers: machinery. ¹¹³ Somerset RO, DD/AH, Acland Mss., D. Davis to Acland, 1 April 1801. ¹¹⁴ This deliberate manipulation of the market to create advantage can be seen in the study of the books of the firm of Jebb and Co., as Roger R. Wells’ account makes clear: R. Wells, ‘The Irish Famine of 1799–1801: Market Culture, Moral Economies, and Social Protest’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest, 175–7.
10 Before the Luddites: Machinery, Regulation, and the State On the night of 11–12 July 1776, a major disturbance broke out in the Somerset woollen-manufacturing town of Shepton Mallet when a riotous mob of weavers, shearmen, etc, collected from the towns of Warminster, Frome, etc, assembled together and proceeded to the town . . . with the intention to destroy under cover of night a machine lately erected by the clothiers for the advance and benefit of the manufactory and to pull down the houses and take away the lives of those persons who encouraged and promoted the use of it.
However, news of their intention had reached the Shepton clothiers. They immediately sought help and three magistrates, having alerted the dragoons stationed in the town, assembled in an inn to await developments. At 2 a.m., when nothing untoward had happened, two retired to their beds, leaving the third, John Strode, on watch. No more than an hour elapsed before the mob, who had remained at a little distance from the town restrained by a fear of their power, apprehending there was no magistrate left to command the military, assembled, made an attack on the poor house where the machines were worked and before the soldiery could be had out to oppose them, broke into the same, and not only destroyed the particular objects of their resentment, but committed other injuries to a very considerable amount.
Some of the mob ‘forcibly entered one gentleman’s house, destroyed all his furniture and drank two hogsheads of beer’. Strode, backed by the dragoons, confronted the mob and managed to capture five or six ‘ringleaders’. However, when the soldiers attempted to escort them to the prison, they were ‘attacked by the whole body with an intention to effect a rescue’. Strode read the Proclamation but, backed by a ‘principal clothier’, probably John Billingsley,¹ he also ‘very humanely . . . endeavoured by all the arguments prudence could suggest to convince them of the impropriety of their ¹ Bath Chronicle, 1 August 1776. Billingsley, suspected of being the leading figure behind the introduction of the machine, was later to become a leading agriculturalist. See J. de L. Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1660 to 1880 (Clarendon Press, 1971), 127 n. 1.
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conduct, and to persuade them to disperse’. The rioters were having none of it: ‘they, with the utmost effrontery, declared they would not leave the town till their companions were discharged. To save the effusion of blood, even this demand was on the point of being granted to them, on condition that they promised never to molest or disturb the town again.’ Even this concession failed to calm the situation: some of the most daring, at the instigation of the women, began more cruelly to stone the soldiers who bore the attack with uncommon fortitude and moderation, and discharged two rounds over the heads to deter them if possible from proceeding to extremities. This leniency had not the desired effect, for they continued the attack with redoubled vigour and very much wounded seven of the soldiers. Driven to this extremity, no alternative was left. The command to level their pieces was given and one man fell and six were wounded. This intimidated them, and they retired with the utmost precipitation.²
The machine at the centre of this disturbance was the spinning jenny. Invented by James Hargreaves around 1764, jennies had massively speeded up the production of spun cotton in Lancashire. Hand-powered and easily fitted into small workshops, the early jenny allowed a spinner to manage many spindles simultaneously, not just one as with the old wheel and distaff method. Adapted to work wool, its attractions for pioneering clothiers like Billingsley were clear. They realized that the jenny could not only cut labour requirements and therefore their costs: it would also enable them at last to exert some real control over spinning production by ending the need to put out spinning many miles to domestic female spinners. The Shepton Mallet clothiers had recognized that the jenny was likely to provoke hostility, since spinning not only provided gainful employment for the wives and daughters of scattered labourers of the surrounding countryside: it was every bit as important to the family incomes of woollen workers. The clothiers had therefore held negotiations with their local weavers and shearmen, resulting in an agreement whereby the jennies would first be set up in the town’s workhouse as a public experiment, thereby allowing all to evaluate their likely impact. The presence of the dragoons in the town suggests that these discussions had not been entirely peaceful.³ However, although the local woollen workers were prepared, if reluctantly, to give the machines a trial, their fellow workers in the neighbouring towns clearly were not. Their irruption into the town was well coordinated and planned, with both men and women marching some seventeen miles to attack the jennies. This was clearly a pre-emptive strike, intended to frighten off a laboursaving technology which they realized would severely disrupt their way of life. Violence gave way to a sharp propaganda war. The Shepton weavers printed and distributed a handbill setting out their objections to the jenny. This claimed ² Gloucester Journal, 15, 22 July 1776; Bath Chronicle, 18 July 1776. ³ Bath Chronicle, 1 August 1776.
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that the machine ‘will spin so much wool in one day by the help of two persons as eight common spinners, consequently six women out of eight . . . will be deprived of employment and become a burden on the Parish for support’. This was an argument sure to alarm ratepayers and paternalists alike. The spokesmen for the local clothiers in turn responded with a mixture of threats and bribes. Workers were reminded ‘to consider how benumbed the cold hand of charity is, and how much more rational a part they would act by a quiet following of their lawful employments, than seeking the ruin of a trade, the decline of which would involve themselves and families in the most calamitous circumstances’. But weavers were also prompted to look to their self-interest. ‘Is it not notorious that the clothiers have been, and at this time are, incapable through want of spinning to execute their orders of cloth?’ The jenny ‘would furnish them with much more regular and constant employment than it is possible for them otherwise to have’. It was perhaps possible that ‘the spinners might experience some inconvenience’, though even this was questionable: even so, ‘is an invention of such undeniable benefit to every other branch of work-people, to be rejected because it might possibly be attended with a light, inconsiderable, partial inconvenience?’ There is little sign that this argument won many converts.⁴ The riot and its aftermath alerted clothiers across the West of England not only to the potential of the jenny but also to the dangers of losing the public debate. A meeting of prominent clothiers from all three counties was held in Bath in September and two public resolutions, the second signed by over one hundred leading manufacturers, were circulated in the region’s press. These notices praised ‘the spirited conduct’ of the Shepton Mallet clothiers ‘in introducing a new spinning machine which was conceived to be of general utility to the woollen manufacturers’ and repudiated reports ‘that the poor by the introduction of spinning machines will be deprived of a considerable part of their labour and consequently become burdensome to their parishes’. Indeed, they declared ‘that no mischievous consequences are likely to ensue as far as they can at present foresee’, and that ‘they will be ready to discount the use of the machines if after a proper trial they shall be found in any degree prejudicial to the poor’. Public experiments on the Shepton model were urged in every town to set minds at rest. Failure to introduce the machine, however, would be catastrophic: ‘It is apprehended unless the use of such machines be adopted, the woollen trade in the area will daily decline; and that the manufacturers of the North will enjoy such great advantages as cannot fail to secure them the preference at all markets.’⁵ The Somerset woollen workers and, it seems, some more respectable local figures were clearly not convinced. A petition was drawn up and presented to the Commons in early November, complaining that the jenny threatened the livelihoods of ‘many thousands of the industrious poor’ and praying that the legislature ⁴ Gloucester Journal, 16 September 1776; Bath Chronicle, 19 September 1776. ⁵ Bath Chronicle, 19 September, 10 October 1776.
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would abolish the machine. It was rejected.⁶ Failure prompted a more conciliatory approach. An ‘address to the gentlemen clothiers’, published on 27 November, sought an agreement whereby the machines would be set up and worked publicly in the workhouse for a period of two months. Two delegates appointed by the workers would monitor performance. In this way ‘the surprising utility which you have asserted, or the dangerous consequence which we have apprehended, may evidently appear.’⁷ It is not clear if the experiment did in fact continue. Contrary to the clothiers’ hopes, the jenny did not prove an instant success. Adapting it to the more fragile fibres of fine wool proved problematic, while it is clear that resistance remained strong. It was not until the end of the decade that the jenny was reintroduced. Again violence was the result. A Whit Monday crowd at Frome in 1781 forced their way into a house where one had been set up and smashed it to pieces. They reassembled the following day and threatened the houses of a card maker and local clothiers but were persuaded to disperse by the magistrates, backed up by armed local property owners. Troops were urgently demanded since ‘the civil power was unequal to the suppression of riots which have arisen . . . in consequence of the machines lately introduced here for the spinning of wool’.⁸ Such disturbances significantly delayed the take-up of the machine. Only in the late 1780s was the jenny first introduced into the notoriously fractious woollen-making districts in Wiltshire and into Gloucestershire. It does not appear to have led to further disorders: rapid expansion of production no doubt aided its absorption since more opportunities were available for woollen workers’ wives and daughters to find work at the loom. But the labour-saving consequences of the machine proved if anything even more devastating than the Somerset workers had originally claimed. Across the rural districts the byemployment of out-spinning collapsed, removing at a stroke a key underpinning of family economies and engendering a rapid rise in poor rates.⁹ Only one non-textile-manufacturing community resisted. That was the mining community of Keynsham where in March 1790 ‘a lawless banditti of . . . colliers and their wives’ assembled to smash the spinning jennies that two local manufacturers had just installed in their premises. A magistrate confronted them. The miners, it was reported, advanced at first with much insolence, avowing their intention of cutting to pieces the machines lately introduced into the woollen manufacture; which they suppose, if generally adopted, will lessen the demand for manual labour. The women became clamorous. The men were more open to conviction and after some expostulations were induced to desist from their purpose and return peaceably home. ⁶ House of Commons Journal, xxxvi. 7. ⁷ Bath Chronicle, 28 November 1776. ⁸ Ibid., 14 June 1781; WO 4/113, Jenkinison to Jesser, 7 June 1781. ⁹ A Letter to the Landholders of the county of Wilts. on the alarming State of the Poor (Salisbury, 1793), 3–4; J. Anstie, Observations on the Importance and Necessity of Introducing Improved Machinery into the Woollen Manufactory (1803), 20; G. Turner, A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Gloucestershire (1794), 31.
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However, their wives’ fears were soon realized and in June further disorders broke out. Dragoons were needed before order could be restored.¹⁰ The disorders occasioned by the introduction of the spinning jenny in the West of England replicated the earlier response to the machine in Lancashire when in 1768 weavers and craftsmen from Blackburn assembled in the town and marched en masse to Stanhill, the home of the machine’s inventor, James Hargreaves, where they attacked his house and destroyed both looms and jennies. They then marched on to Brookside where, it was claimed, they attacked Peel’s mill, again smashing jennies. Further attacks followed in February 1769. A mob led by weavers demolished houses, presumably containing the jennies, at Oswaldtwistle, Old Accrington, and Blackburn. In March further disorders arose around Bolton when the ‘mob arose, burnt what machines they could discover, and carried about their fragments in triumph’.¹¹ And in June, Bolton weavers led a crowd who attacked the house of James Thweat, who was ‘using a certain engine or spinning wheel invented for the more easy and expeditious way of manufacturing goods’.¹² Initial hostility towards the machine seems to have melted quite quickly, since, with the cotton industry growing rapidly, alternative work was easily come by. However, within ten years those who had taken up the jenny found themselves in turn endangered by the introduction of Arkwright’s patented improvement on the original model, the powered ‘large jenny’ which could run as many as seventy separate spindles at once. These large jennies, combined with the new powered carding engines, were housed in new large workshops. Arkwright’s new-built mill at Birkacre, near Chorley, represented, it was later claimed, a capital investment of some £4,400. These mills clearly presaged a factory system. With the earlier boom now slowing, the growing tide of mechanization generated widespread hostility. In early October 1779 a series of major disturbances swept the cotton districts as large crowds of angry cotton workers attacked mills and workshops containing the new machines. ‘In the course of a few days [the rioters] pulled down and broke in pieces several hundreds of the Carding, Doubling and Twisting Engines and large Jennies.’¹³ Josiah Wedgwood, travelling to Bolton, encountered a mob of ‘about 500 & upon enquiring of them the occasion of their being together in so great a number, he told me they had been destroying some engines, & meant to serve them all so through the country’. Another, larger, mob attacked Arkwright’s mill at Birkacre, but his partner, with the assistance of a few neighbours repulsed the enemy. Two of the mob were shot dead upon the spot, one drown’d, & several wounded. The mob had no fire arms & did not ¹⁰ J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (1971; Longman 1979), 121. ¹¹ Thoughts upon the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture, addressed to the Working People in that Manufacture and to the Poor in general, by a Friend of the Poor (Manchester, 1780), 10. ¹² A. G. Rose, ‘Early Cotton Riots in Lancashire, 1769–1779’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Anitiquarian Society, lxxiii–lxxiv (1963–4), 65–8, provides an account of these disorders. ¹³ R. Mather, An Impartial Representation of the Case of the Poor Cotton Spinners in Lancashire (1780), 4.
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expect so warm a reception. They were greatly exasperated & vowed revenge; accordingly they spent all Sunday & Monday in collecting fire arms, & ammunition, & melting their pewter dishes into bullets. They were now join’d by the D. of Bridgwaters colliers and others, to the number, were were told, of eight thousand, & march’d by beat of drum, & with colours flying to the mill . . . They found Sr Rd Clayton guarding the place with 50 Invalids armed, but this handfull were by no means a match for enraged thousands; they therefore contented themselves with looking on, whilst the mob completely destroy’d a set of mills valued at £10,000.¹⁴
Indictments at the subsequent assizes made clear the extent of machinery destroyed in the mill: six carding engines and twenty spinning engines, spinning frames, spinning wheels, and twisting mills, respectively.¹⁵ Rioting now spread to Bolton, north to Blackburn, and south to the villages around Manchester. Wedgwood recorded, ‘On Tuesday we heard their drum at about two miles distance from Bolton a little before we left the place.’ They contented themselves with breaking the windows & destroying the machinery of the first mill they attacked, but the next, the machinery being taken away, they pull’d down the building & broke the mill wheel to pieces. They next proceeded to Mr Keys of the Folds, & destroyed his machine, & water wheel & and then went to work with the lesser machines, all above so many spindles.
The mob warned that they intended to ‘destroy all the engines . . . throughout all England’.¹⁶ Only when troops were introduced in strength was order eventually restored. While it is clear that the Lancashire justices had little tolerance for disorder, there was sympathy for the cotton workers. Magistrates at Wigan sought to persuade the cotton manufacturers to suspend the use of all machines worked by water or horses and agreed to present the spinners’ grievances to Parliament. This petition, its tone redolent of paternal concern for regulation and reciprocity, was rejected.¹⁷ Nonetheless, the bench made clear its feelings when those rioters who had been arrested were given relatively light sentences and Arkwright’s claim for compensation for his losses was rejected. Arkwright famously abandoned Lancashire for the East Midlands and, for a period, the riots delayed take-up of the machines. However, within a decade the large jenny and the successor mules had completely transformed cotton yarn production. Labour-saving machinery therefore brought into sharp focus two very different views of the world of work. To the employer, machinery offered a means of accelerating production, extending direct control, reducing labour costs, and maximizing profitability. Spinning technology offered to break the bottleneck to growth and presented an opportunity to extend direct control over the process of ¹⁴ K. Farrar (ed.), Letters of Josiah Wedgwood, ii. 1771–1780 (Manchester, 1903), 532–4. ¹⁵ A. P. Wadsworth and J. de L. Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire (Manchester, 1931), 497–8, tabulates the indictments from Lancaster assizes, 1779. ¹⁶ Letters of Josiah Wedgwood, 536. ¹⁷ House of Commons Journal, xxxviii (1780), 7.
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production. Powered machinery like the large jenny or mule further presaged the relocation of production from cottage to factory. For domestic manufacturers such a vision constituted a nightmare, a dangerous threat to work and customary practices. From the earliest stages of industrialization, therefore, machinery was associated with threats to employment and to autonomy. However, while all new technologies aroused fears, the response which they elicited was dependent upon two variables: whether the new machine might be absorbed into the current work structures with minimal disruption; and the willingness of those threatened to resist, a factor generally determined by a previous history of resistance and protest. We can see this if we examine the response to scribbling engine into the textile industry after 1790. Scribbling, or carding, engines aligned the staple into a continuous roving that could then be spun on the jenny. Early carding machines were attacked alongside the large jennies in Lancashire in 1779 but thereafter seem to have been accepted within a fast-developing industrial structure. Introduced into the woollen manufacture of Yorkshire in the mid 1780s, they were immediately viewed with hostility. When the first consignment of machine-scribbled rovings arrived in Bramley, ‘the women rose in a mob when the cart came with the slubbing, pulled it from the cart, and trod it under their feet in the street!’¹⁸ As at Shepton Mallet and Wigan, there was a determined attempt to persuade public opinion of the economic and social dangers of innovation. The owner of the machine, a Mr Copley of Hunslet, was singled out in a petition published in the Leeds newspapers in June 1786, which claimed that thousands had been put out of work by scribbling engines and predicted that, as each could do the work of ten men, thousands more would follow. Ratepayers were warned of the inevitable costs to the poor rates, while concerns were voiced that the machinery was impairing the strength of the yarn. Only nine out of the 1,700 clothiers who had stands in the Leeds Cloth Hall were said to favour the machine. However, whereas new spinning and preparatory machines in Lancashire were housed from the first in new and large protofactories, in Yorkshire the early scribbling engines were mainly set up by master clothiers within the workshop culture of the Domestic System. A correspondent pointed out that, of the 170 scribbling engines set up, ‘120 or 130 are small and the small ones will not do more work than four men’.¹⁹ In this way the early fears of the Yorkshire workers were assuaged. Nonetheless, scribbling engines did in fact prove to be the key dynamic towards industrial transformation in the region for the scribbling mill, run on a joint stock basis, often housed in old corn mills where power could easily be obtained, marked the first step towards a factory system in the county.²⁰ However, its strategic significance was disguised because such mills, ¹⁸ W. B. Crump, The Leeds Woollen Industry, 1780–1820 (Leeds, 1931), 12. ¹⁹ Leeds Mercury, 13, 20, 27 June 1786. ²⁰ P. Hudson, ‘From Manor to Mill: The West Riding in Transition’, in M. Berg, P. Hudson, and M. Sonenscher (eds.), Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 124–46.
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working on commission, did not immediately threaten other production processes and allowed a master clothier not only to obtain ready-made supplies of yarn but also freed labour within his workshop: ‘a clothier may as he did formerly spend a fortnight or more in doing that which he may now get done in a one day’, a correspondent noted.²¹ In Yorkshire, carding and scribbling had been undertaken as part of a variety of tasks by his journeymen and family within the clothier’s workshop and its loss therefore was not severely felt. In the West of England, however, scribbling had for over a century been undertaken by specialist adult male workers who were employed directly by the gentlemen clothiers since this enabled them to maintain far better quality control, crucial for their domination of the valuable superfine market. Scribblers constituted perhaps 10 per cent of the adult male workforce there.²² A clothier in 1803 claimed that they were ‘a poor, sickly, decrepit race of beings’, while a petition in 1794 described scribblers as men who were, ‘being advanced in age or by accident or misfortune, disabled from working in other occupations which require bodily exertions’.²³ However, scribblers were far from feeble. William Temple had in 1739 lambasted scribblers, along with shearmen, as drunken, lazy, and truculent and they proved more than willing to defend their conditions.²⁴ Scribblers quickly realized that scribbling engines spelled the end of their trade. The first clothier in the West to attempt to set up a scribbling engine was Joseph Phelps, a leading manufacturer in Bradford-upon-Avon. On 14 May 1791 a large crowd, numbering over 500, surrounded his house and workshops, demanding that he abandon the experiment. Phelps refused. ‘The mob then proceeded to throw stones whereby many gentlemen, who had come to his assistance, were wounded.’ There were no soldiers in the town and the only magistrate was ill. The mob finding neither magistrate nor soldiers called in became more riotous and showered such a quantity of stones as broke all the windows, much of the furniture and injured the number within. Mr. Phelps and the gentlemen with him first fired powder, then small shot; but finding this had no effect and that they were in danger of their lives, they at length fired ball; whereby a man, woman and a boy were killed and another man and a boy dangerously wounded. This however did not disperse this unlawful multitude and Mr. Phelps, wishing to avoid all further effusion of blood, gave the engine up to them.
The engine was dragged onto the nearby town bridge, given a mock ‘trial’ and then ceremoniously burned.²⁵ Eventually order was restored when the ²¹ Leeds Mercury, 11 November 1783. ²² A. J. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991), 76. ²³ British Parliamentary Papers, 1802–3, 7, Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the woollen clothiers’ petition, 308; Journal of the House of Commons, xlix. 600. ²⁴ W. Temple, The Case as it now Stands between the Clothiers, Weavers and other Manufacturers with regard to the late Riot in the County of Wilts. (1739), 16. For example, in 1761 scribblers in Shepton Mallet were enforcing an effective closed shop. Gloucester Journal, 10 November 1761; see also Randall, Before the Luddites, 76. ²⁵ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 23 May 1791; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 23 May 1791.
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‘respectable inhabitants’ and a large force of special constables assembled. Four men were taken up for riot but, while the coroner brought in a verdict of justifiable homicide on the dead rioters, they were all acquitted at the assizes. However, Phelps won damages from two of his neighbours for failing to assist him against the rioters and further compensation of £250 from the inhabitants of the town. This only served further to polarize opinion on the issue of machinery.²⁶ The Bradford-upon-Avon disturbances set the tone for subsequent attempts to introduce the scribbling engine into Wiltshire. Troops were now permanently garrisoned in the main town but disorder still followed at Frome and at neighbouring Trowbridge whenever they were temporarily removed. In September 1791, a crowd at the latter town, numbering between 400 and 500, insulted the magistrates, knocked down the constables, and freed anyone arrested, while in August the next year, a reduced garrison proved unable to resist them: ‘the people of Trowbridge carried their point and have destroyed the machines’, the officer in command reported.²⁷ The attempt by William Jenkins to set up the machine in Shepton Mallet in September 1794 led to riots and the destruction of his warehouses,²⁸ while at Westbury extensive riots greeted the machine. John Anstie reported that it had been hoped that the machine might be introduced gradually: But last week the scribblers at Westbury rose and demolished two scribbling engines. I was there on Monday and found the people were quiet—but the gentleman who owned the machines had been deterred by some slight opposition from taking up any of the people.
Since he had begun to take in work for other clothiers at his new scribbling mill in the remote village of Poulshot, Anstie too had received threats, even though he had detachments of soldiers stationed in a nearby village for its defence. Disturbances broke out again in Westbury in August.²⁹ Only in the later 1790s did the scribblers’ resistance begin to fade. The vigorous response of the Wiltshire and Somerset scribblers towards the scribbling engine contrasted markedly with that of their colleagues in Gloucestershire. Here, as we noted earlier, woollen workers had found the bench far more willing to listen to their complaints than those in neighbouring woollenmanufacturing counties and their response to scribbling engines proved to be significantly less confrontational. A minor disturbance greeted the first recorded introduction of the machine at Woodchester in April 1792 when ‘a considerable number of the more idle of the people employed in the clothing trade’ assembled and threatened to pull down some newly erected engines. ‘They proceeded to the different shops in order to seduce the work people to follow them, but could not ²⁶ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 2, 9, 22 August 1791. ²⁷ WO 1/1052, Hubert to Yonge, 24 August 1792. ²⁸ An Account of the Proceedings of the Merchants, Manufacturers and others concerned in the Wool and Woollen Trade (1800), 150, 153–5. ²⁹ WO 1/1052, Anstie to Secretary at War, 28 May 1795; Seymour, Long to Secretary at War, 7 August 1795.
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succeed, as they found them universally convinced of the advantages the machines rendered the trade of this county.’³⁰ Scribbling engines therefore began to spread and soon scribblers were without employment. In the spring of 1794 the Gloucestershire scribblers began to organize a petition to Parliament. They first attempted to win local hearts and minds, placing a notice in the press ‘To the Landowners, Renters and other persons affected by the poor’. This complained that ‘a great number of persons brought up to the business of wool scribbling are now nearly deprived of employment in consequence of the late introduction of scribbling machines.’ They hoped that Parliament would agree ‘to suppress or otherwise confine the said machines to a specific number’ but sought support and money to effect a petition. Although their employers threatened to sack anyone who supported the campaign, the petition was presented in May, claiming 1,400 signatures. It did not seek an outright ban, only regulation of machines ‘to such a number as will not engross the whole of the labour but leave sufficient employment for the petitioners to support themselves and families’. Presented too late in the session, the petition languished. Even though the Gloucestershire scribblers clearly had supporters among the local gentlemen, they proved unable to sustain the campaign further.³¹ The responses to the early mechanization of textile production demonstrated the limitations of resisting labour-saving machinery. The vigorous pre-emptive actions employed by workers reflected an entirely sensible assessment that customary work practices might only be sustained by preventing the innovation in question becoming established. It was for that reason that, for example, the cloth workers of Wiltshire marched through the night to stop the experiment at Shepton Mallet and the cotton workers of Blackburn mobilized to stamp out the use of the large jennies in the districts around them. However, pressure had to be sustained not only across time but also space. Innovators locally might be stopped but others farther afield, if successful, would soon put pressure upon local employers to follow their lead. Therefore, force was supplemented by a recognition of the need for public support. Propaganda, therefore, in the form of explanation to passers-by like Wedgwood, handbills, and letters to the press, was employed to argue a case that emphasized the social damage that the new machines would cause by way of unemployment, rising poor rates, and social fracture. The interests of the innovators were presented as selfish and narrow while those of the workers were shown as being those of the wider community. This was a perceptive approach. Textile workers understood that ratepayers were wary of the way in which clothiers were happy to boost migrant numbers in times of boom but looked to the landed and commercial classes to fund these migrants through the poor law when trade slackened. In the West of England there was the additional distrust that arose from the clothiers’ ³⁰ Gloucester Journal, 30 April 1792. ³¹ Gloucester Journal, 5, 12, 26 May 1794; House of Commons Journal, xlix. 599–600; Gloucester Journal, 9, 16 June 1794.
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attempts to free the market in imported wool, at the expense of domestic wool prices. Moreover, such a response constituted a direct appeal to the paternalist ethos. In the aftermath of the introduction of the spinning jenny this approach was not without success, since the machine certainly did lead to widespread rural unemployment, as Eden noted.³² His findings were echoed around the country. From Rutlandshire, for example, Crutchley lamented the modern practice of spinning by machinery (a most unfortunate, and, to the rising generation of this island, a most ruinous invention, I fear) . . . The wives and daughters of farm labourers in agricultural districts are already become almost destitute of employment, unless in the summer months.³³
Sometimes the combination of the threat of disorder and direct appeal to the bench resulted in action, as in Wigan in 1779 and in Somerset in 1776 where local paternalists were instrumental in bringing the problem before Parliament. However, paternal sympathy too rarely translated into willingness to intervene directly. Innovators too realized the importance of propaganda in ensuring that they obtained the support, if only grudgingly, of the local authorities and ratepayers. They therefore emphasized the dangers of disorder, the crimes against property, and the benefits that would flow for the consumer and therefore the local economy from mechanization. However, they were also prepared to use their own threats. Failure to mechanize, they asserted, would simply mean that production would go to other rival regions, forcing them either to follow or to abandon the trade entirely, with catastrophic consequences for the poor rates. If such threats did little to endear the manufacturers to their fellow respectable citizens, they could not be ignored.³⁴ From the first, therefore, the battle over machinery saw different value systems in opposition, with the respective forces of custom and innovation vying not just over the physical introduction of new technologies but also for the moral high ground of public support. This was seen clearly in the conflicts over the introduction of cloth-finishing machinery.
THE WILTSHIRE OUTRAGES The battle over machinery in the textile industries reached a climax in the years after 1790 as innovators began to try to introduce labour-saving machinery into the woollen cloth-finishing trade. Those workers who had been affected by the introduction of preparatory machinery had been relatively weak in terms of ³² Sir F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor (1794), iii. 796. ³³ J. Crutchley, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Rutlandshire (1794), 25. ³⁴ See, for example, J. Billingsley, A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Somerset (Bath, 1797), 161; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 2 June 1794.
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industrial organization and bargaining position. Cloth-finishing machinery, however, threatened the most powerful labour group in the industry, the cloth dressers. As we have noted, cloth dressers, known in the West as shearmen and in Yorkshire as croppers, were the labour aristocrats of the industry since their role involved high-level skill and judgement.³⁵ Working in the main in independent shops owned by master dressers, cloth dressers occupied a pivotal point in the production of woollen cloth, taking the material once it had been woven and fulled and then raising a nap by brushing the surface of the cloth with a ‘handle’, a cross-shaped wooden tool set with teazle heads, before shearing it flat with large hand shears. All cloths had to be raised and sheared many times in order to produce the soft even texture that was the pride of the industry and commanded premium prices. The quality of their work determined the final value of the cloth: ‘They can make a piece 20 per cent better or worse by due care and labour or the reverse.’³⁶ Cloth dressers were notoriously intractable, enjoying high wages and with a strong propensity to worship St Monday. They were highly organized. Until the late 1790s, trade clubs and societies remained local, though linked by an effective tramping system. However, in 1797 the growing threat from machinery prompted the formation of a new federal union, the Brief Institution, which brought together West Country shearmen and Yorkshire croppers.³⁷ The cloth dressers were not going to be displaced without a fight. Cloth dressers were threatened by two different machines. The first, the gig mill, was essentially a series of revolving linked rollers, each set with teazles, across which the fulled cloth was drawn for the nap to be raised. It could be powered by horse, water, or steam and could do the job more quickly, if, as the workers claimed, very much more crudely, than could a man. The gig mill was far from a new invention. It, or something like it, had been around in the mid-sixteenth century when it was proscribed by the statute, 5 & 6 Edward VI, c. 22, ‘An Act for the putting down of gig mills’. The machine was allegedly being used to overstretch and thereby damage the ‘ground’ of the cloth. Clothiers in the 1790s claimed that the old act did not apply to the ‘new’ sort of gig mill, but this was disingenuous since it is clear that the machine had long been used, and tolerated, in remoter parts of both regions to ‘raise’ coarse white cloths. Cloth dressers were willing to accept its use on such cloth, but they were not prepared to tolerate its extension to finer cloths, the mainstay of both regions’ economies. The second threat came from the shearing frame, invented by a Sheffield clergyman, John Harmer, in 1787 and then improved in 1794. It was made up of pairs of shears set in a frame which was drawn across the cloth while the shears were operated mechanically. As a new invention, it was not covered by the old legislation. Between them, these two machines foretold the knell of the dressers’ trade. ³⁵ The following paragraphs draw extensively upon Randall, Before the Luddites, 109–85. ³⁶ PC 1/43/A152, Observations respecting the combinations of workmen, 1799. ³⁷ On cloth dressers’ combinations, see Randall, Before the Luddites, 115–19, 131–47.
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The gig mill had long been used on the periphery of the cloth-making region around Huddersfield on coarse cloth production but the croppers had ensured that it never advanced into the main centres of manufacture. However, in the early 1790s merchants were alerted to the possible cost savings from machinery. In November 1792, the Leeds merchants published a broadsheet calling for a meeting discuss ‘the various kinds of MACHINERY for the better and more expeditious DRESSING of WOOLLEN-CLOTH . . . lately invented’. The meeting noted that the machines were already ‘set to work in different Parts of this County’ and resolved that it was ‘absolutely necessary that the Town should partake of the Benefit of all sorts of Improvements that are, or can be made in the Dressing of their Cloths, to prevent the Decline of that Business’. A subscription was established to purchase and test the machines, ‘previous to their being brought into general use’. The merchants recognized that there would be resistance: ‘we will protect and support the free Use of the proposed Improvements in Cloth Dressing by every legal Means in our Power.’³⁸ These bold words, however, belied a real weakness in the face of a determined combination. Leeds was the centre of the cloth-dressing trade and there were some 1,500 croppers and only 22 master dressers in the town. ‘The fund belonging to . . . the cloth workers is said to amount to above £1,000 and the despotic power they really possess and exercise almost exceeds belief.’³⁹ Intimidation and, no doubt, the vested interest of the master dressers ensured that no machine was set up. Indeed, it was not until 1799 that any merchant felt sufficiently confident to establish a gig mill in the town. It was immediately destroyed.⁴⁰ Benjamin Gott, the pioneering Leeds merchant whose factory at Bean Ing housed a wide range of textile machinery, tried to set up a gig mill there in 1801. He was forced to abandon the experiment.⁴¹ ‘I have little expectation that any measure of vigour . . . will be taken at Leeds just now’, noted Fitzwilliam. ‘The intimidation is too strong.’⁴² However, while in the major cloth-finishing centres the croppers’ sway held firm, in the area around Huddersfield machinery was steadily increasing. This was later to prove the Achilles’ heel for the powerful croppers’ union.⁴³ In the West of England, the introduction of cloth-dressing machinery met with two very different responses. In Gloucestershire, where the gig mill had been long used on coarse white cloth production, the shearmen attempted to use the law and the bench to resist its spread to fine cloth production. As increasing numbers of clothiers, in an attempt to cut costs, set up gig mills in early 1794, Gloucestershire ³⁸ Crump, The Leeds Woollen Industry, 317–18. ³⁹ PC 1/43/A152, Observations respecting the combinations of workmen, 1799. ⁴⁰ Leeds Intelligencer, 6 December 1799. ⁴¹ Crump, Leeds Woollen Industry, 327. Gott attracted further odium when he attempted to employ two apprentices, both over the age of fourteen. His croppers walked out en masse, while his attempt to enlist the help of other merchants resulted in a general strike of all dressers in the town, which, after a prolonged battle, was won by the strikers. Leeds Mercury, 2 October 1802; Wentworth Woodhouse Mss., F45, 117, Beckett to Fitzwilliam, 28 January 1803. ⁴² Wentworth Woodhouse Mss., F45, 117, Fitzwilliam to Pelham, 27 September 1802. ⁴³ See below pp. 283–4.
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shearmen hired a solicitor, organized a series of meetings and presented a petition, demanding that Parliament should uphold 5 & 6 Edward VI, c. 22. The clothiers, furious at this presumption, threatened that, unless the petition were withdrawn, they would dismiss all involved in organizing it and blacklist them. In fact, ‘considerable numbers’ were discharged since the shearmen stood firm. A fierce propaganda battle erupted in the press, with the clothiers asserting that the law was obsolete and that their shearmen were using the petition to disguise the formation of combinations. The shearmen for their part dismissed these allegations and continued to emphasize the illegality of the gig mills. But in an effort to win the support of ratepayers and the bench, they also emphasized their determination to ‘seek relief in no other measures than are consistent with law and the character of honest and industrious men’.⁴⁴ Their petition was presented too late in the session for parliamentary action and it was made clear to the shearmen that the clothiers’ friends in Westminster would resist any bill based upon it.⁴⁵ Trade improved and opposition declined. This failure to press their legal case and their acceptance of some use of the gig mill proved ultimately damaging not only for the Gloucestershire men. Growing use of the machine in that county brought pressure to bear on clothiers in Wiltshire and Somerset, who in turn felt obliged to follow suit. The Wiltshire shearmen were more inclined towards direct action. Back in 1767 a clothier in the village of Horningsham had attempted to set up a gig mill, assuming that its distance from the main woollen towns would provide adequate protection. However, over 500 shearmen assembled from across the region and marched on the village where they ‘pulled down and destroyed a new gig mill just erected for dressing broad cloth, whereby a man and a boy can do as much work in two hours as thirty men could do in a day’. While fifteen men were subsequently tried and three imprisoned for their parts in this incident, the attack served as a powerful warning to others to abstain from mechanization.⁴⁶ It was not until 1795 that the machine reappeared, this time in a mill just outside Marlborough, some fifteen miles from the nearest woollen town. This time the Wiltshire shearmen turned to the law. At the summer assizes of 1796 they brought a prosecution against the manufacturer, Samuel Cook, ‘for using a gig mill contrary to 5 and 6 Edward VI’. It was dismissed on a technicality, a decision perhaps influenced by the fact that the machine in question was being used in an experiment, under the aegis of the Marquis of Ailesbury, to revive the woollen manufacture in the town and thereby to employ the numerous spinners thrown out of work by the rise of machine spinning.⁴⁷ The Wiltshire shearmen remained convinced the law was on their side. However, the case persuaded them that direct action would be a more effective weapon. So began a protracted campaign of violence that was to culminate in the Wiltshire Outrages of 1802. ⁴⁴ Gloucester Journal, 12, 19 May 1794. ⁴⁵ House of Commons Journal, xlix. 599; Gloucester Journal, 16 June 1794. ⁴⁶ Bath Chronicle, 21 July, 6 August 1767. ⁴⁷ Randall, Before the Luddites, 127–8.
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Cook’s victory in the courts encouraged others to set up the machine in mills on the periphery of the woollen-making district. They soon found themselves the victims of threatening letters and, where these failed to deter the manufacturer, determined attacks. Paul Newman suffered attacks on his property and was warned: We have just gave you a Caution how we do intend to act as soon as we can make it convenient . . . you and yours shall be in Flames you House and Machinery before you are 2 Months longer We are determined to do it and the rest of your neighbours shall share the same fate.⁴⁸
In 1799 John Bell of Batheaston was likewise warned: I send you this to inform you that we the cloth workers of Trowbridge, Bradford, Chippinham, & Melkshom, are almost or the greatest part of Us Oute of worke and Wee are fully convinst that the greatests of the Cause is your dressing work by Machinery And we are determind if you follow this practise any longer that we will keep som People to watch you Abought with loaded Blunderbuss or Pistols and Will certainly Blow your Brains out it is no use to Destroy the Factorys But put you Damd Villions to death.⁴⁹
He seems to have been warned off since no further action was taken. However, others were less easily stopped. The firm of Bamford and Cook set up not only gig mills but also shearing frames in their mill at Twerton, near Bath, in late 1797. Some 200–300 men assembled, marched first to Nunney where they forced their way into a shear grinder’s shop where Bamford’s shears were being sharpened, smashed them, and then, their number strengthened to, it was claimed, 800–900, marched on to Twerton ‘in order to hang up Bamford and two of his men, to burn down his works and those of Collicott and Co.’.⁵⁰ Only their timely interception by the magistrates, backed by cavalry, prevented them achieving their intention.⁵¹ However, although such violence was not without impact, it could not deter the introduction of the machine for long. The pressure from Gloucestershire meant that clothiers in the main Wiltshire and Somerset woollen towns were soon having to consider erecting gig mills or sending their cloths elsewhere to be dressed. The result was an explosion of industrial conflict. In April 1802 two clothiers at Warminster, Henry Wansey and Peter Warren, introduced gig mills. Their shearmen immediately struck work.⁵² As the strike progressed, the clothiers’ property came under attack. Violence was incremental. First, both men received anonymous threatening letters. Then minor pieces of property were destroyed: a row of young trees was cut down and a hayrick set on fire.⁵³ Four men stood by Wansey and refused to strike. They were warned: The journeymen shearmen of Bradford, Trowbridge, Melksham, Chippenham, Calne and Devizes Have a Greed to Pay you 4 that are at work a Vizett that cuteth after the Giggar ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ ⁵¹ ⁵²
London Gazette, 1002 (October 1796). Ibid., 507 (May 1799). ⁵⁰ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 15 January 1798. HO 42/41, Bowen to Portland, 20 December 1797. HO 42/65, Wansey to King, 9 April 1802. ⁵³ House of Commons Journal, lviii. 886.
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Raiser But if you will Leve of that a Bomable acton you shall Be Free after the Public Notes But if you dont Leve of you may expect Shearmans Law; that is to be Cuartered And your flesh and Bones Burnt and your aishes Blown away in the weend I send you this as a frind.⁵⁴
The shearmen clearly hoped that the strike, which soon extended to other dressing shops, would bring the clothiers to heel. However, when clothiers elsewhere started to send their cloths to Warminster to be dressed, further disorder occurred. The cart of Mr Bayley of Calstone Mills near Devizes, returning from Warminster loaded with cloths, was overtaken on the Downs by six men with blackened faces who took out the cloths, cut five or six of them to pieces and damaged fourteen others to the amount of £200.⁵⁵
Further damage followed. Warren lost a rick of oats and a large dog kennel, both burned: ‘not a labourer in that place would assist in any degree to save from destruction either corn or premises.’ A week later a strike breaker’s cottage was fired into ‘in the dead of night’ while ‘about 11 o’clock in the night a gun was fired into the chambers of Mr Henry Wansey but happily did no mischief except breaking the windows.’ A fortnight later Warren lost a barn and stable.⁵⁶ However, with troops now in the town, the clothiers held firm. The Warminster clothiers’ lead encouraged their bolder colleagues nearer the main woollen towns of Trowbridge and Bradford-on-Avon to erect gig mills. And, while, in these towns themselves, no one was sufficiently brave to set up the machines, clothiers there seem to have combined to use the threat of the machines to reduce the time allowed for manual finishing of cloths, in effect forcing down wages. Their shearmen immediately went on strike.⁵⁷ Here too strike action was supplemented with minor acts of violence: an attempt was made to fire a clothier’s corn rick while guns were fired at windows in the night.⁵⁸ Thomas Tugwell, a Bradford-on-Avon clothier, received a letter that threatened: Death or Glory to you T. and M. Tugwell. We will burn you and your Horses we will Cut your heart out and Eat him you ot to have your Dam heart cut out of your Body you will Go to Hell for Starveing the Poor thes Shot Shaw fly by night for some of you.⁵⁹
The biggest threat to the shearmen, however, was posed by the new large mill erected in 1801 by John Jones at Staverton. The ‘Staverton Superfine Woollen Manufactory’ epitomized a future that woollen workers across the region dreaded. Standing ‘not less than six different floors and having sixty five window to the front’, the mill was ‘filled with every sort of newly invented machinery so that ⁵⁴ HO 42/65, Jones to Pelham, 29 July 1802; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 20 December 1802; London Gazette, 386 (April 1802). ⁵⁵ HO 42/95, printed list of outrages, 25 September 1802. ⁵⁶ HO 42/65, Davies to Pelham, 15 June 1802; Hughes to Pelham, 23 June, 1802; Jones to Pelham, 29 July 1802. ⁵⁷ HO 42/65, Read to Pelham, 6 September 1802; British Parliamentary Papers, 1802–3, 7, Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the woollen clothiers’ petition, 212. ⁵⁸ HO 42/65, Jones to Pelham, 29 July 1802. ⁵⁹ HO 42/65, Printed list of outrages; London Gazette, 692 (July 1802).
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every kind of process except weaving can be done there.’⁶⁰ Since its completion it had attracted hostility: Jones, a magistrate, had written to Pelham in the Home Office demanding further troops in the district to protect it and to intimidate refractory workmen.⁶¹ The striking shearmen persuaded many of Jones’ workers to join them, ‘under a pretence that they had been threatened and forced to do it’. It was, he claimed, ‘a most wicked attempt to ruin our manufacture by threats’. Jones responded by introducing shearing frames, thereby exacerbating the conflict. The immediate result was an attack on the premises. Windows were smashed but the attackers seem to have been driven off by armed guards. A further two companies of infantry were now rushed to the area specifically ‘for the purpose of assisting the magistrates by acting as sentries or guards upon sundry mills’.⁶² The military presence did not prevent further destruction. The following night a mill and house owned by John Newton at Clifford were set on fire and burned down. Newton had been using the Twerton gig mill in the late 1790s and appears to have now set his own up. Again the local populace showed no inclination to protect the property of innovators: ‘part of the mill might have been saved but the populace would not permit it.’ Newton immediately requested guards for his second mill at Limpley Stoke.⁶³ In Trowbridge the house of a blackleg was ‘demolished’, while a large rick owned by a Bradford-on-Avon clothier was set on fire and destroyed.⁶⁴ And on the night of 22 July a mill at Littleton, owned by a Trowbridge clothier, Francis Naish, was burned down. Naish had been a particularly fierce opponent of the shearmen and it seems likely that he had erected finishing machinery in the isolated mill that he had bought in 1797. The mill was managed by Ralph Heath, who lived near the premises. Along with three workers, he had been guarding the mill every night. That evening Heath, waiting in his cottage, received a message from Naish that he had heard the shearmen might attack that night. Naish’s information proved correct. At about one o’clock, four or five men, some with their faces blacked and all of them Armed with Muskets, Pistols, Bayonets and other weapons Rushed into the Room crying out ‘Stand you Buggers’, at the same time presenting their arms and swearing ‘that no one should stir’.
Their leader demanded, ‘Damn your eyes, is there any soldiers or guards here?’ and, not trusting Heath’s denial, went out to check, leaving one man, with ‘his face blacked and a pistol in his hand’, standing guard on Heath and his assistants. The mill was set on fire and burned to the ground at a loss said to run to £8,000.⁶⁵ ⁶⁰ P. A. Nemnich, Neueste Reise Durch England, Schottland und Irland (1807), 222. ⁶¹ Wiltshire Cuttings, xiv. 138–9, Pelham to Jones, 5 December 1801. ⁶² HO 42/65, Jones to Pelham, 27 July 1802; Read to Pelham, 5 September 1802; Jones to Pelham, 29 July 1802; HO 50/392, Brownrigg to King, 29 July 1802. ⁶³ HO 42/65, Newman to Jones, 16 July 1802; Jones to Pelham, 18, 29 July 1802. ⁶⁴ ASSI 25/2/8, indictment of Samuel Baker; HO 42/65, Jones to Pelham, 29 July 1802. ⁶⁵ HO 42/65, information of Ralph Heath, 6 August 1802; KB 1/31/pt 2, draft copy of the information of John Pearce; Jones to Pelham, 3 August 1802.
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The destruction of the mill broke the nerve of the Trowbridge clothiers who abandoned their attempt to force down wages. The shearmen returned to work and ‘afterwards printed and circulated a paper of what had been agreed to’.⁶⁶ However, violence continued elsewhere. Paul Newman lost two more ricks and alarms at Twerton and Melksham sent the yeomanry scurrying to protect mills there.⁶⁷ An attempt at open negotiation with Jones failed and a delegate announced ‘he would rather be hanged than recommend to the shearmen to accept Jones’ offer’. The result was a second attack on Staverton. This time a brisk fire fight broke out as defenders sought to drive off attackers who scaled the high surrounding walls with every intention of entering the premises. A bell summoned dragoons who had been stationed nearby in the expectation of trouble but, though they spent the next hour scouring the neighbourhood, they caught no one. The following night a dwelling house owned by Jones at Bearfield was set on fire and destroyed. Jones believed it was a ruse to draw off the mill’s defenders to enable a third attack but the soldiers did not leave their posts.⁶⁸ The attacks on the mills frightened most clothiers into abandoning the use of the gig mill, though at Staverton and in some of the outlying mills they remained at work. But the successful attack on Littleton mill came at a price. Heath claimed that he recognized the man who had stood guard over him as Thomas Helliker, a shearman’s ‘colt’ or apprentice who worked in Naish’s shop in Trowbridge. He was arrested and subsequently hanged for his alleged part in the outrage. On the night of his arrest, Naish’s workshops in Trowbridge burned to the ground.⁶⁹ The Wiltshire shearmen had not abandoned their belief that gig mills were proscribed by legislation and, three days after the second attack on Staverton, they brought a case before the Grand Jury at the Salisbury assizes, arguing that the gig mills and shearing frames were a nuisance.⁷⁰ The case came to nothing, though it was never likely that, with respectable opinion horrified by the ‘Wiltshire Outrages’, the grand jury would find in the shearmen’s favour. Respectable opinion was not alone. The government too was horrified by the events in the county and, convinced that the local magistrates were showing too little resilience in the face of disorder, dispatched more troops and, crucially, a Bow Street magistrate, James Read, to the county to take charge of counter-measures. He set in train a policy of continual harassment, informing Pelham: Two or more justices meet daily at one or other of the manufacturing towns, and as the Combination Acts afford a very convenient pretext for summoning and examining upon oath any suspected persons, I have continually some before them. It answers the ⁶⁶ HO 42/66, Read to Pelham, 6 September 1802. ⁶⁷ HO 42/65, Jones to Pelham, 29 July 1802; Bath Journal, 2 August 1802; Inhabitants of Melksham to Pelham, 26 July 1802. ⁶⁸ HO 42/65, Jones (sen.) to Pelham, 26 July 1802; Jones to Pelham, 29 July 1802; Bath Journal, 2 August 1802; WO 40/17, Rogers to ?, 4 August 1802. ⁶⁹ HO 42/66, Read to Pelham, 6 September 1802. ⁷⁰ Ibid., Read to Pelham, 6 September 1802.
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double purpose of keeping the magistrates at their post and of alarming the disaffected.⁷¹
Displaying scant regard for legal niceties, a model that would be followed by certain magistrates in the north in 1812, Read arrested many shearmen, often merely on suspicion, and sent them to Salisbury gaol in the hope that, far from their friends, they might talk. High hopes were entertained that Helliker, the only one positively identified, would impeach others but the youth resolutely maintained his innocence and said nothing about the outrages. Read did manage to get details about the Brief Institution from the arrest of one shearman, Thomas Bailey, and was able thereby to seize the union’s books and arrest the committee.⁷² All were thrown in prison until the assizes in March the following year. There the case against the committee collapsed when Bailey’s ‘recollection failed him . . . And on account of the oath not being proved . . . the prisoners were acquitted’. Heath, however, reiterated his identification of Helliker, fatally for the boy.⁷³ However, back in the summer of 1802, even though Read could not obtain the evidence he wanted, his aggressive tactics, coupled with the large military presence, ushered in a tense peace. The Wiltshire Outrages alarmed the government, justices, and the clothiers, but they did not prove particularly destructive, certainly when compared to the Luddite disturbances that they presaged by some ten years. Only three mills were destroyed. However, some six corn ricks, one barn, two houses, a stable, several outhouses, and a large dog kennel were burned, while trees were cut and windows smashed. Violence was incremental, at each stage providing the obnoxious clothiers with an opportunity to see the error of their ways. There was little in the way of personal violence directed against the clothiers. The shearmen had no interest in driving employers out of business: they simply wanted them to behave as formerly and to respect the customary rights of the trade. They continued to emphasize to the wider community their strong sense that the machines were illegal and that therefore their resistance was constitutional rather than simply economic. Such an argument was not without effect since, as in earlier conflicts, the wider community stood solidly behind those who opposed labour-displacing machinery. Read, like the justices before him, bemoaned the wall of silence that greeted his enquiries. A year later, an innovating clothier, John Anstie, noted, ‘there are a considerable number of persons of respectability in the three counties who . . . still continue to consider the introduction of machinery into the woollen trade as unfriendly to the general interest and peculiarly injurious to the poor.’⁷⁴ In June 1802 a Warminster magistrate lamented that ‘The inhabitants of this ⁷¹ HO 42/66, Read to King, 13 September 1802. ⁷² Ibid., Read to Pelham, 9, 10 August 1802. ⁷³ Bath Chronicle, 10 March 1803. ⁷⁴ J. Anstie, Observations on the Importance and Necessity of Introducing Improved Machinery into the Woollen Manufactory; more particularly as it respects the interests of the Counties of Wilts., Gloucester and Somerset (1803), 7–8.
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town, partly through fear and partly from a disgust to the introduction of machinery, do not come forward to take any active part in showing their detestation of these outrages.’⁷⁵ Tactic admission that they had lost the propaganda war was seen when the clothiers’ committee, set up to prosecute machine-breakers, resolved in August ‘That the Chairman should be desired to caution the public against the scandalous and false reports circulated by the shearmen and others; and also to caution all persons against illegal contributions.’ They were even forced to threaten prosecution of anyone supporting the shearmen.⁷⁶ It was clear that they had not won the hearts and minds of the wider public. Although the disorders in Wiltshire in 1802 were extensive, in many respects the outrages remained characteristic of the old dialogue through disorder model of industrial relations. Nor did they differ much from earlier protests over the introduction of machinery, save that the shearmen proved far more resilient opponents. The direct intervention of the government, through Read, shifted the balance significantly in favour of the innovators but, even with the force of the state behind them, most clothiers in Wiltshire remained unwilling to confront a powerful labour group head-on. Therefore, for some years neither gig mill nor shearing frame extended beyond the mills of a few leading innovators. However, the shearmen’s legal action against the gig mill at the assizes focused attention upon the old statutes that, if only nominally, still regulated the industry. That focus was reinforced when, concomitantly, the weavers of Gloucestershire sought stricter enforcement of the old apprenticeship legislation and of that prohibiting the use of loomshops or ‘weaving factories’. The result was that the battle over machinery in Wiltshire helped to trigger a parliamentary examination into the role of regulatory legislation, an examination that was to have major repercussions for subsequent developments in the industry.
REGUL ATION, THE STATE, AND THE TRIUMPH OF POLITICAL ECONOMY We have noted before how, throughout the subsistence crises of the years 1795–1801, the ministry sought to assert the importance of allowing the market to resolve problems of supply, severely criticizing those who tried to maintain the old moral economy of food. It was a policy that proved far from successful, since, faced with dearth, local justices muddled through using methods that had worked in the past. However, the regulation of industrial production provided a far more clear-cut issue on which political economy might join battle with the old regulatory model. Two parallel cases that shaped the way in which government would ⁷⁵ HO 42/65, Hughes to Pelham, 23 June 1802. ⁷⁶ Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 23 August, 11 October 1802.
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henceforth tackle the question of industrial control emerged in the years from 1800 to 1806: cotton weavers’ wages; and the regulatory legislation in the woollen industry. Let us examine cotton first. The expansion of cotton manufacture astounded contemporaries. In the period from 1780 to 1800 the number of cotton weavers doubled as the rapid improvements in the production of yarn gave rise to growing demand for men and women to convert it into cloth.⁷⁷ In the main this was a period of considerable prosperity—Radcliffe claimed it as ‘the golden age of this great trade’⁷⁸—but such times did not last. By 1800 labour supply was outstripping demand and cotton manufacturers, anxious to reduce costs in an industry where profit margins were being ruthlessly eroded, saw their opportunity. Wage rates were cut, in some cases heavily. Bythell describes cotton weaving as ‘a kind of by-occupation for the aged, the unmarried sisters and daughters, and the growing children of the family’.⁷⁹ This line, heavily pressed by manufacturers in their evidence to Parliament, was far from the truth. Certainly women weavers were increasingly numerous, their number, as noted earlier, swollen by the loss of their previous occupations and by the fact that male weavers often owned more than one loom that could be utilized by wives or daughters. But in 1800 the majority of weavers were certainly men, though the contribution of female weavers to the family economy was far from insignificant. Cotton weaving, for all its many variations in product and skill requirements, still remained an ‘honourable’ provincial occupation.⁸⁰ The smallware and checkware weavers, based in the major towns, were well organized, while in the country districts numerous friendly societies provided the bedrock of parochial organization.⁸¹ It was from that base that the cotton weavers faced the problem of falling piece rates. In 1799 weavers in Bolton established an ‘Association of Weavers’. The Association was built upon parish societies, coordinated into an industry-wide organization through regular delegate meetings. Its purpose was simple: to secure an act of Parliament that would ensure that piece rates could be strictly regulated.⁸² From the first, the Association recognized the need to engage public ⁷⁷ For a discussion of the numbers employed in the industry, see S. D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (Macmillan, 1972), 60–1. ⁷⁸ W. Radcliffe, Origin of the New System of Manufacture commonly called Power-loom Weaving (Stockport, 1828), 63. ⁷⁹ D. Bythell, The Handloom Weavers: A Study in the English Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1969), 58. For a more recent account of the domestic weavers, see G. Timmins, The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Manchester, 1993), ch. 3. ⁸⁰ This comes over clearly in the evidence taken by a series of parliamentary enquiries, in 1800, 1803, and 1808, looking into the weavers’ case for a mechanism to regulate piece rates. ⁸¹ J. Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (Croom Helm, 1981), 166–8; J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Harvard, 1983), 133–4. ⁸² On the Weavers’ Association, see Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, 46–70; HO 42/47, Bancroft to Portland, 11 April 1799; Bayley to Portland, 16 November 1799.
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opinion on its side. Its pronouncements therefore fitted completely within a moral economic conspectus. A short declaration emphasized the weavers’ belief in the ‘mutual interest of both employers and employed—well knowing that to combine their interest together is the only method to expect success’. Another notice on 20 June reiterated that the weavers ‘do not consider themselves in opposition to the masters’, though references to ‘enemies’ indicated recognition that some large employers would oppose any sort of outside intervention. The Association also made clear that it understood basic economics: ‘We know that it would be a folly to say masters must give wages, without having the means in their power to do it consistent with their own interest.’ But it made great play of the negative consequences of unfettered competition: the weavers ‘are continually subject to reductions in their wages, which never find their level’. Appeal was directed towards paternalists as they urged all, ‘even the landed property’, to support their cause. And the moral and constitutional rights of the small man were strongly asserted: ‘the opulent expect that the government should guarantee them the peaceable enjoyment of their property, the poor have the same claims upon it and expect the same.’⁸³ The establishment of the Weavers’ Association alarmed the local bench, while manufacturers claimed it was both illegal and politically subversive. The weavers vehemently denied this ‘calumny’, announcing that they were ‘firmly attached to our King and Country’. Asked to advise on its legality, the Home Office had to admit that, as an organization overtly aimed at petitioning Parliament, it was entirely legal. Nevertheless, magistrates were urged to keep a close eye on its development.⁸⁴ A debate arose in the press in which each side set out their arguments. Predictably, the manufacturers pressed a reading of political economy, emphasizing the primacy of the freedom of capital. The weavers, on the other hand, rejected the political economy of market forces and asserted the importance of community: We believe the price of labour to be now shackled, so as to be highly injurious to the community. . . . The price of labour neither is not nor ought to be governed by the demand . . . yet we believe the legislature might adopt regulations which would make the demand both regular and increasing.⁸⁵
By the spring of 1800 the Association had collected over 23,000 signatures and delegates travelled to London to present their petition. This argued the need for paternal intervention, complaining of the wage reductions and ‘oppressions effected by a powerful combination of the master weavers or manufacturers’ who possessed ‘so much Secrecy, Wealth and Power’ that weavers were unable to ⁸³ These pamphlets were reprinted in Radcliffe, Origin of the New System of Manufacture, 73–7. ⁸⁴ HO 42/47, Bancroft to Portland, 11 April 1799; PC 1/45/A155, Bancroft to Portland, 29 April 1799; HO 43/11, Portland to Bancroft, 8 August 1799. ⁸⁵ Manchester Gazette, 14 December 1799, cited in Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, 141.
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defend themselves. The petition requested a summary mechanism ‘for the settling of Wages, Pay and Price of Labour from time to time’. Support came in a petition from ‘the master manufacturers of Chester, York and Lancashire’, which complained of the difficulties arising from the lack of an effective method of settling wages.⁸⁶ The Weavers’ petition came at a point when, as we have noted, industrial workers in the region faced starvation. Food riots were stretching the capacity of the forces of law and order across the country and some MPs at least were sympathetic towards the weavers. A select committee took evidence from, among others, the Weavers’ Association secretary, James Holcroft of Bolton. He argued the need for a legislative equivalent of the 1773 Spitalfields Act. ‘We wish for no particular Wages, but what may be fixed upon mutually between the Manufacturers and Workmen, or by the Quarter Session.’⁸⁷ The Commons apparently were impressed, to the alarm of Prime Minister Pitt. He sent for the weavers’ solicitor and offered an alternative measure, namely ‘a principle of arbitration, and, if we would give up the application for a regulation of wages . . . he would give us that in lieu of it’.⁸⁸ From Pitt’s point of view, this was eminently preferable to a new formalization of wage setting. This intervention resulted in the Cotton Arbitration Act, passed in 1800, by which, in any dispute over wages, both weaver and employer could each appoint an arbitrator. They were charged with thrashing out a compromise. Where they could not, appeal could be made to a justice whose decision would be binding.⁸⁹ The measure carried echoes of the Act that the weavers of Gloucestershire had obtained in 1756. Although the Act was a compromise, the weavers determined to make the best of it. Within weeks, hundreds of weavers had taken cases to arbitration. Many manufacturers chose to settle in advance and those cases that did go to the justices, except in Manchester, were mainly resolved in favour of the weavers. However, when in December 1800 several hundred weavers from Whitefield simultaneously presented cases for arbitration to the Manchester bench in an attempt to prevent a swingeing wage cut imposed by one large employer, they were rebuffed. Thomas Bayley, a prominent Manchester justice, made his contempt for the process evident. Confronting Holcroft and the plaintiff weavers, Bayley ‘tossed the Act of Parliament by’, advising them, ‘I would have you not to mind Mr Holcroft, or this new Law’. They should ‘go home and mind their Business and not be persuaded by cunning artful and designing men against their own interest.’ Holcroft responded that ‘he was not to be intimidated by any thing which was said from the Bench.’⁹⁰ Nonetheless, this exchange showed clearly that in Manchester the weavers might expect few favours from the authorities. ⁸⁶ House of Commons Journal, 1799–1800, lv. 261–2. ⁸⁷ Ibid. 489. The Act they had in mind was that of 1773, 13 Geo. III c.68. ⁸⁸ Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, 49. ⁸⁹ 39 & 40 Geo. III, c.90. ⁹⁰ British Parliamentary Papers, 1802–3, 3, Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee on the Cotton Weavers’ Petitions, 12–24, 34, 44.
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The Manchester bench were not alone in wanting to ignore the new legislation. Manufacturers soon discovered that the Act had a loophole: although appointing an arbitrator was obligatory, there was no obligation on an arbitrator actively to seek a solution. Soon employers were appointing men based far afield who had no intention of acting.⁹¹ The Act languished and wage rates once more began to slide. There can be little doubt that the actions of the cotton masters and the unwillingness of some on the bench to take the Act seriously fostered the increasingly angry attitude among the weavers that Home Office correspondents, with rising concern, noted as the year passed. Coinciding with frequent food riots and with information from spies and agents provocateurs of secret meetings, sedition, and arming and drilling on the moors, it all served only to convince a frightened bench and government that insurrection was just around the corner.⁹² Nonetheless, it was characteristic of the cotton weavers that, while all this was going on around them, the Association determined in the spring of 1801 upon a further petition, this time for a bill to amend the 1800 Act and force manufacturers to abide by the spirit of the legislation. Their meetings were constantly broken up, but the weavers persisted and presented a new petition in February 1802. This time the manufacturers were better organized and a committee was established, funded with £2,000, to oppose any further measure and to seek to repeal the original Act.⁹³ They successfully delayed discussion on the petition and any new bill until 1804 when a Select Committee heard the arguments. Radical MPs again pointed out that the simplest solution lay in applying the Spitalfields Act to cotton. Some manufacturers, shaken by the increasingly cut-throat competition in the trade, now supported new legislation, though most opposed it. However, with the immediate food crisis past, Parliament chose merely to modify the 1800 Act by making magistrates responsible for choosing a small panel of arbitrators from which both sides might choose one representative to argue their case.⁹⁴ It proved virtually useless in practice. The Cotton Arbitration Acts of 1800 and 1804 proved to be the last pieces of legislative intervention into manufacturing broadly sympathetic towards the industrial moral economy of the worker. They proved a distinct contrast to the line that Parliament was to take on the question of industrial regulation in the woollen industry. By the turn of the century, weavers in the West of England were experiencing similar problems to those in Lancashire and Cheshire. The growth in cloth ⁹¹ Ibid. 44–60. ⁹² The presence in Lancashire and Cheshire of large numbers of Irish certainly accentuated that fear since, following the abortive Irish Rebellion of 1798, the shadowy United Irishmen secret society had extended its organization into the region and across the Pennines into Yorkshire. This, and sister organizations such as the United Englishmen and United Scotsmen, were certainly plotting revolution in the years from 1799 to 1802. See R. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795–1803 (Alan Sutton, 1986), 179–86; and R. Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (Croom Helm, 1984), 128–36. ⁹³ Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, 147. ⁹⁴ Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, 52–3. The New Act was 44 Geo. III, c. 87.
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production in the last quarter of the eighteenth century brought not only short-lived prosperity but also a dilution of the workforce as incomers flocked to the trade. With the Peace of Amiens in 1801 and the termination of military contracts for uniforms, the region began to experience deepening depression, which lasted into 1802. Although demand thereafter was patchy, it is clear that the pressure on piece rates grew apace and the weavers, the largest group of workers in the industry, found themselves increasingly exposed. Two factors compounded their problems: growing numbers of ‘illegal’ weavers, persons neither formally apprenticed nor, as was more usual, ‘brought up in the trade’; and a growth of ‘loomshops’ or weaving ‘factories’. Apprenticeship in the woollen industry was clearly prescribed in legislation that had been augmented in the early eighteenth century, whereas loomshops were prohibited outside corporate and market towns by 2 & 3 Philip and Mary c.11. Loomshops had given rise to extensive protests in Wiltshire in 1785 and 1787 and in Gloucestershire in 1792, while local societies had sought at various points to limit the increase in ‘illegal’ weavers.⁹⁵ The two issues were often linked. Domestic weavers resented the time discipline and the lower piece rates that shop weaving entailed, fearing that they would lower rates for all. And in shops the complex tasks of setting up and taking cloth off looms were undertaken by foremen: the weaver simply sat and wove, a skill that could be picked up relatively quickly, which is why newcomers were often to be found there. In the early summer of 1802, just as the Wiltshire Outrages were breaking out, weavers in Bisley hired a Cheltenham solicitor, Walter Hilton Jessop, to prosecute a Chalford clothier, who was employing non-apprenticed weavers in a loomshop, before the summer assizes.⁹⁶ This was clearly a test case and, as the Gloucester Journal noted, hinged on ‘whether the defendant, a clothier, was entitled to exercise the trade of a weaver without being apprenticed to or following the business for seven years’. The case was settled out of court when Webb agreed to cease employing illegal weavers, a promise he then broke, but the action cemented the weavers’ belief that they had successfully asserted their constitutional rights, a view endorsed by the judge who expressed his approval of the issue of this business, observing that the statute most explicitly and incontestably establishes that a legal apprenticeship or following of a trade for the customary period was the only protection for the undisturbed exercise of it by any person whatever.⁹⁷
This success led to the formation of a county-wide association, the Woollen Cloth Weavers’ Society, in September which, with Jessop as its president, soon had a membership of over 3,000. The society clearly had the support of some prominent gentry and was modelled on a friendly society. But its main purpose ⁹⁵ Randall, Before the Luddites, 191–5. ⁹⁶ British Parliamentary Papers, 1802–3, 7, Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the woollen clothiers’ petition, 44–5. ⁹⁷ Gloucester Journal, 9 August 1802.
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was to use the law to rid the trade of non-apprenticed workers. In October notices were served on 150 illegal weavers that ‘you will be prosecuted for setting up, occupying, using or exercising the trade of a woollen or broad cloth weaver not having served an apprenticeship thereto’ unless they left the trade within a month. Jessop believed that around 100 did do so.⁹⁸ The Gloucestershire clothiers, angry at the judge’s remarks, were extremely alarmed by these developments. They immediately formed themselves into a committee to lobby Parliament for the ‘revision’ of the law. Moreover, they agreed to contact the committee of Wiltshire and Somerset clothiers that had been established to coordinate prosecution of those behind the Wiltshire Outrages. In November the two committees met jointly at Bath and agreed to work together to get the old Acts, particularly those relating to the gig mill, loomshops, and apprenticeship, repealed.⁹⁹ In December 1802 a petition was presented to the Commons arguing that the clothiers were ‘at this time harassed and threatened with divers vexatious prosecutions’, even though the Acts were widely considered redundant.¹⁰⁰ The clothiers were well-connected and leave was immediately given to introduce a bill to suspend those Acts that ‘are now rendered impractical, detrimental and obsolete’. Representatives of the leading innovators were heard and the measure was quickly approved. However, the Lords were less easily persuaded. A Select Committee was therefore established to investigate the matter. It met in June 1803. The proposed repeal of the old legislation polarized opinion in both the West and Yorkshire. In both, the campaign was led by the wealthy innovators and resisted by the journeymen. But the ranks of capitalists were deeply divided. In Yorkshire the master clothiers almost to a man repudiated the lead of cloth hall trustees when they supported the measure and established the Clothiers’ Community, the authentic voice of the small producer. Master dressers there likewise petitioned against repeal while the merchants were split. In the West, too, capital was deeply divided. Jones asserted that seven-eighths of the trade supported repeal, but it was clear that only the large capitalists were on his side. Indeed, in all the large Wiltshire towns clothiers opposing repeal were in a large majority.¹⁰¹ The majority of those involved in the industry at all levels, therefore, shared the view that repeal was the aim of ‘a small but affluent and powerful association of master clothiers who seek the completion of their fortunes in an utter freedom from Parliamentary restraint’.¹⁰² ⁹⁸ Gloucester Journal, 4 October 1802; British Parliamentary Papers, 1802–3, 7, Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the woollen clothiers’ petition, 45. ⁹⁹ GCL, JF.13.25, Minutes of the manufacturers’ committee; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 23 August 1802; British Parliamentary Papers, 1802–3, 7, Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the woollen clothiers’ petition, 134, 137–8, 259, 340. ¹⁰⁰ House of Commons Journal, lviii. 75. ¹⁰¹ Randall, Before the Luddites, 216–19, 222–5. ¹⁰² Considerations upon a bill now before Parliament, for repealing (in substance) the whole code of laws respecting the woollen manufacture of Great Britain: and for dissolving the ancient system of apprenticeship (London, 1803), 3.
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The Select Committees of 1803 and 1806, which both considered the state of the woollen manufacture, proved to be pivotal in defining the state’s attitude towards industrial regulation, at least in so far as that regulation hindered economic growth. Both enquiries took evidence from a wide range of those employed in the industry in the West of England and Yorkshire. Moreover, the proposed repeal of what proved to be seventy-eight ancient statutes that still nominally regulated the trade placed the discourse about the future shape of the industry, and character of future governmental attitudes towards industrial regulation, under a national spotlight, allowing workers and capitalists an opportunity to articulate their understanding of the very nature of the role of industrial production and of the respective rights of capital and labour. As such, the debate both within and, as importantly, outside the Select Committees proved to be an ideological confrontation every bit as crucial for the future of the industry as the physical confrontations that had preceded them. These debates over the state of the woollen industry provide the historian with exceptional insights into the widening division between two very different political economies: the older quasi-mercantilist moral economic values espoused by the woollen workers, master clothiers, and small capitalists; and the new laissezfaire philosophy of the innovators.¹⁰³ Such views had been aired before, but generally only in the local and regional press. Now they were heard on the national stage. On the one side the case was couched in terms of precedents, moral values, the need for regulation, and respect for different forms of property rights such as apprenticeship; on the other the emphasis remained upon the liberty of capital, the need to sweep away restraints upon innovation, and the dangers of tolerating combination. Significantly, both sides emphasized the need to restrain monopoly. The West of England clothiers’ counsel urged that Parliament should ‘encourage competition and not monopoly’, meaning the ‘monopoly’ granted by the old statutes to apprenticed workers, which, among other restraints, prevented clothiers setting up loomshops.¹⁰⁴ The woollen workers’ spokesmen saw the quest for freedom as ‘wholly a race among individuals’. If the manufacturers were given their way, the industry would be taken over by ‘overgrown rich monopolists’. The legislature must protect the woollen workers ‘from falling sacrifice to the spirit of monopoly, to private cupidity in the guise of public good’. Randle Jackson, the attorney representing the cloth dressers before the 1806 committee, warned of the calamity of ‘exchanging the progressive wisdom and experience of five hundred years’ for ‘this new philosophy, this emancipation from restraint . . . which preceding generations have treated with the scorn it deserves’.¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰³ On this debate and its significance, see Randall, Before the Luddites, ch. 7. ¹⁰⁴ T. Plomer, The Speech of Thomas Plomer to the Committee of the House of Commons . . . relating to the Woollen Trade (Gloucester, 1804), 70. ¹⁰⁵ Observations on woollen machinery (Leeds, 1803), 14, 22; R. Jackson, The Speech of Randle Jackson to the Committee of the House of Commons appointed to consider the state of the woollen manufacture (London, 1806), 40, 43.
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The spokesmen for the innovators were as much inclined to play the man as the ball. Thomas Plomer, counsel of the West of England clothiers, made clear that only one side should be heeded in Parliament’s deliberations: When it is considered who are the class of persons associated, corresponding in different parts of the kingdom—their passions warmly engaged in the immediate subject of consideration—their rate of understanding and education very little able to comprehend the true interests of the trade, or their own interests—very liable to be misled by designing men— will any man tell me that it is not a serious subject of alarm to the country?¹⁰⁶
The weavers’ counsel, E. Wigley, asked, ‘Is there any more harm in the weavers of Gloucestershire associating in a body . . . than in the gentlemen who came before you in 1803 for a repeal? They also formed an association.’¹⁰⁷ But the message was lost on its listeners. The ‘outrages in the West’ were constantly alluded to, the benefits of the factory system extolled, the dangers of combination luridly publicized. The select committee of 1803 recommended the repeal of the old legislative code, but the Lords, less easily swayed by the urgings of manufacturers and merchants, would agree only to a suspension of the old Acts. The second enquiry in 1806 again strongly supported the case for deregulation, emphasizing the rights of capital to do as it saw fit. Progress could only come from the general spirit of enterprise and industry among a free and enlightened people, left to the unrestrained exercise of their talents in the employment of a vast capital; pushing to the utmost the principle of the division of labour; calling in all the resources of scientific research and mechanical ingenuity.¹⁰⁸
This testament to laissez-faire marked a sea change in government policy. The Commons approved it at once, though the Lords were again less easily persuaded to ‘throw away the wisdom of the ages’.¹⁰⁹ Further suspending acts followed until repeal finally came in 1809. This swept away not only the old Acts concerning loomshops, the stretching and straining of cloths, the numbers of looms a master weaver might employ, and that proscribing gig mills. It also repealed all the old Acts concerning apprenticeship in the woollen industry. From being the most regulated industry, the woollen trade now became one of the least. The defeat of those who sought to uphold the old legislative framework had major implications for the future of the woollen industry. It opened the way for more loomshops, falling piece rates, and the rise of the factory system. Moreover, it provided a green light for those who wished to introduce finishing machinery. In Wiltshire, clothiers were still too traumatized by the Outrages to press their ¹⁰⁶ Plomer, The Speech of Thomas Plomer, 13. ¹⁰⁷ E. Wigley, The Speech of E. Wigley on behalf of the Woollen Weavers of Gloucestershire to the Committee of the House of Commons appointed to consider the State of the Woollen Manufacture (Cheltenham, 1806). ¹⁰⁸ British Parliamentary Papers, 1806, 3, Report and minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the State of the Woollen Manufacture, 7–11. ¹⁰⁹ The phrase comes from Jackson, The Speech of Randle Jackson, 40.
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advantage and few gig mills or shearing frames were established until the end of the war. That fear was augmented by an attempt to murder Jones as he rode home from Staverton one night in 1808. The bullet missed, though the gun was fired ‘so close to my head the priming . . . considerably injured my eyes’.¹¹⁰ This, and simultaneous reports of a projected armed uprising against machinery, sent even more troops rushing into the region. It was an indication of what was to follow in Yorkshire in 1812. The new spirit of laissez-faire also impacted upon the cotton weavers. Their disappointment with the 1804 Act prompted a new wave of petitioning seeking a bill along the lines of the Spitalfields Act. A petition in 1806 fell foul of a dissolution of Parliament while the following year another, said to contain over 130,000 signatures, also was allowed to languish.¹¹¹ Meanwhile, weavers’ conditions worsened further. By January 1808 Rowbottom was noting, ‘the weaving Trade in all its Branches in the Lowest Ebb wich as put the poor into a very Deploreable Situation and there is no hopes of Better times until a Genneral peace takes place.’¹¹² Manufacturers like Richard Ainsworth of Bolton were now pressing for regulation: ‘capital, ingenuity and industry cannot ensure success in the Cotton Trade till some limits are fixed by the Legislative below which the wages of workmen cannot be reduced.’ So in March 1808 a Select Committee finally interviewed witnesses.¹¹³ However, it was clear that the government, assiduously lobbied by large cotton manufacturers who remained implacably opposed to any compromise, had little taste for further regulatory mechanisms. Perceval made clear that the hearing was only token: ‘it was better that the cotton weavers should be disappointed after a discussion of the merits of their application . . . than by a refusal . . . to submit it for consideration.’¹¹⁴ The measure was withdrawn. The anger that met news of this failure was palpable, but the weavers remained orderly, calling a large meeting on St George’s Fields in Manchester to discuss a general strike. Magistrates ordered their dispersal and, when the ‘misguided and disappointed weavers’ refused to leave, read the Riot Act and cleared the field with dragoons.¹¹⁵ In response, the weavers struck work, demanding a general 33.3 per cent wage increase. Throughout the following day small groups of weavers across the region began to collect shuttles to prevent any work taking place. A crowd, variously estimated at between 5,000 and 15,000, again gathered on St George’s Fields, appealing to the borough-reeve and justices to help them to arrange discussions with the manufacturers. The magistrates rejected any such role, refusing to meet anyone connected with ‘a large body of men, assembled in a tumultuous and unlawful manner’. They ordered the crowd to depart. At this point, Joseph Hanson, a prominent manufacturer, radical, and colonel in the ¹¹⁰ HO 42/95, Jones to Hawkesbury, 20, 31 January 1808; Jones and Bush to Hawkesbury, 28 July 1808. ¹¹¹ Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, 148. ¹¹² Oldham Local Studies Library, MF/G19, Rowbottom Diaries, 1 January 1808. ¹¹³ House of Commons Journal, lxiii. 150, 157. ¹¹⁴ Parliamentary Register, 19 May 1808. ¹¹⁵ Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, 149.
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Volunteers, arrived on the scene and sought permission to address the crowd. This was denied and he was ordered to leave, but as he did so, ‘the people huzza’d and he pulled off his hat and spoke to them’. At his trial the following year it was claimed that he had said: ‘My lads, your cause is good—be firm and you will succeed . . . I will support you as far as three thousand pounds will go, and if that will not do, I will go further.’ Hanson’s support encouraged the demonstrators to hold their ground until, in the early evening, the justices read the Riot Act three times and ordered the troops to clear the field. The Times noted: In a moment a general consternation took place, by the cavalry galloping through the ground in all directions. Some were rode over, and a few that were obstinate in dispersing wounded with the cavalry’s swords. One of the people threw a brick and hit one of the horse’s heads. His rider immediately levelled his pistol and shot the man dead on the spot. Another man, for a similar offence, was shot in the thigh: he died soon after. About thirty of the ringleaders are safely lodged in the New Bailey Prison.¹¹⁶
Rowbottom, closer to the people, recorded: these poor Distressed people . . . did not Threaton anny mischief but Begged Something to be done in order to mend their wages wich are most shamefull Lowe the Majestrates Called out the Millitary Col Silvesters and the Rifle Coar with the 4th Light Dragoons from the Barracks who Dispersed the mob Each day and Several where Cut and Slashed to a Great Degree and one poor man Shot Dead on the spot Similar Comotions took place in Stocport Bolton and Bury &c but have not heard of anny lives being lost at those places.¹¹⁷
Supported from friendly society funds, the strike held firm for over two weeks. In Manchester a secret strike committee conducted negotiations with employers mainly through wall posters and notices to avoid being identified. In the country districts, negotiations took on a more face-to-face character and remained peaceful, if tense.¹¹⁸ At Rochdale, though, clashes arose: there the strikers Collected the weavers Shuttles to near a Cart Load the Mejestrates Dispersed them put some in the prison there but the mob Released them and Burned the prisson to the Ground the Majestrates requested the Aid of the Oldham Vollunteers the Drums beat to Arms and about 90 mustered at the Royal Oak Maygate lane but Both the Officers and men where pelted with mud and stones by the populace and some windows where Broken.
And in Oldham, ‘A very Numerous Mob assembled’ and ‘Compeled the Masters to Sighn a paper to Rais the wages for Weaving’, while rioters demolished Bury prison.¹¹⁹ Alarmed, a large meeting of manufacturers offered a 20 per cent ¹¹⁶ The Times, 30 May 1808. See also Annual Register, 25 May 1808; HO 42/95, Farington to Hawkesbury, 24, 25, 26 May 1808; Manchester Mercury, 31 May 1808. Hanson was prosecuted and imprisoned for his actions. T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1823), xxxi, 1809–1813, cols. 11–17. ¹¹⁷ Rowbottom Diaries, 24 May, 1808. ¹¹⁸ Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, 153–5. ¹¹⁹ Rowbottom Diaries, 30 May, 1 June 1808. Rowbottom noted, ‘the Cause of the Riots was the Weavers Bill being thrown out of the House of Commons a Bill wich praied Releif to the poor Weavers’.
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advance. It created dissention in the weavers’ ranks but, within three weeks, all the weavers had accepted and returned to work. It was, by any standards, a remarkable victory.¹²⁰ The benefits of the strike did not last long. By the autumn of 1810 trade was again in decline and wage cuts followed. Further petitions to Parliament begged for relief, the end of the Orders in Council, and, once more, for regulatory mechanisms to rate wages. Delegates again trekked to the capital, to sit around and wait while a Committee of the House considered their case. All they received was advice that the weavers should agree to ‘work at lower prices or . . . employ their labour in some other manner’.¹²¹ Here too, the seeds of Luddism had been sown. ¹²⁰ Annual Register, 1 June 1808; Manchester Guardian, 23 July 1808; Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, 153. ¹²¹ Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 24 June 1811.
11 ‘Engines of Mischief ’: The Luddite Disturbances of 1811–12 In the three weeks between late March and mid-April 1812, three different manufacturers, in no way connected to each other and living and working in different parts of the country, received threatening letters. George Rowbottom was a hosier from Eastwood, a small town west of Nottingham, putting out work in the framework knitting industry of the East Midlands. Mr Smith was a master dresser from near Holmfirth, who, using shearing frames, finished cloth in the West Riding woollen industry. And Thomas Garside was a manufacturer from Stockport engaged in spinning yarn and dressing warps for weaving cotton cloth by steam. Threatening letters, of course, were far from unusual. They formed, as we have noted, a stage in many industrial negotiations, since they were a means of stating demands without the need for anyone to be identified as the negotiator. However, these three letters were linked in that they appeared to bear a common authorship: each carried the imprimatur of Ned Ludd. From head Quarters Genaral Lud George Rowbottom this is to inform you that their is not a man in the town of Arnold bulwell Hucknall nor basford that takes work out unless it is full price full fashion and proper price and size and this is to give you Notice that if you bring or give any more work out without it is full fashion full price and proper size you shall work this frame [drawing of a gallows] with a rope around your neck.¹ To Mr Smith Shearing Frame Holder at Hill End Yorkshire Sir Information has just been given to me that you are the holder of those detestable Shearing Frames, and I was desired by my Men to write to you and give you fair Warning to pull them down . . . you will take Notice that if they are not taken down by the end of next Week, I will detach one of my Lieutenants with at least 300 Men to destroy them and ¹ HO 42/122, ‘From head Quarters Genaral Lud’ to Rowbottom, March 1812. Kevin Binfield’s painstaking assembly of Luddite writings provides the definitive version of such letters and an outstanding analysis of the language and rhetoric that lay behind them. K. Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
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furthermore take Notice that if you give us the Trouble of coming so far we will increase your misfortune by burning your Buildings down to Ashes Signed by the General of the Army of Redressers Ned Ludd Clerk Redressers for ever Amen² Sir We think it our Duty to inform you that We was Intent upon Setting fire to your factory on Account of those Dressing Machines that was and still are Within it. But We Consider that it would Be very Injurious to those Industrious Masters that Occupy the Different parts of it therefore in justice to humanity We think it our Bounin Duty to give you this Notice that is if you do not Cause those Dressing Machines to be Removed within the Bounds of Seven Days from the above Date your factory and all it Contains Will and Shall Surely Be Set on fire . . . it is Not our Desire to Do you the Least Injury, But we are fully Determin’d to Destroy both Dressing Machines and Steam looms, Let Who Will be the Owners We Neither Regard those that keeps them Nor the Army for We Will Conquer Both or Die in the Conflict Remember, We have given you Both time and Warning and if you pay no attention you Must abide by the Consiquence Signd General Justice³
The phenomenon of Luddism continues to fascinate historians and a wider public alike, with good reason.⁴ Popular protests in the eighteenth century frequently threw up leaders, real or imaginary, who, as we have seen, were variously given nominal titles such as ‘captain’ or ‘general’. But none had come up with a proper name to identify their champion. And none had seen the same name not only employed within the specific locality but exported to other very different industrial and geographical contexts. While ‘Captain Swing’ was to enjoy an even wider territorial sway in 1830, Ned Ludd achieved a public recognition which was remarkable. Through newspaper reports, his name was on the lips of all classes around the country and his doings the subject of parliamentary debate. His fame tempted others in distant regions to invoke the power of his signature. Thus in May 1812 a Gloucestershire clothier received the following: Mr Lewis May 10 if you do not see as those that Work at your Mischonry if not Paid better, particuler the shearing frames for Wee be Resolved to set on fire all the Places that Have Got any of ² HO 40/1/1, Ned Ludd Clerk to Mr Smith. Identifying Smith is not straightforward. See Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 208–11. ³ HO 40/1, ‘General Justice’ to Garside, 19 April 1812. The dressing machines in question spun and strengthened the warp, which could then be used for coarse cotton cloth production on power looms. The device was invented and patented by William Radcliffe. ⁴ Significant studies of Luddism include E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz, 1963; Penguin, 1968), ch. 14; M. I. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (David and Charles, 1970); R. Reid, Land of Lost Content (Heinemann, 1986); K. Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and their War on the Industrial Revolution (Addison-Wesley, 1995); B. Bailey, The Luddite Rebellion (Sutton, 1998); and Binfield, Writings of the Luddites.
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it in: and thee mind Jack as if Thee Do not Harken to the above thee shalt Rue for it the same as Pearcevel; We have Done over Lodgmoor and Browns mills; and if you will not alter yourern soon as se as all the shearing searvants . . . be paid more wages or they will Join we if we Gives them a few Pounds; and you tell the Farmers all round you that if Grain is not sold at a Reasonable Price, we will shoot them as they come from Market, for we will have more bread or Blod I am E. LUD⁵
‘Ned Lud’ (for at first his surname seems to have had only the one ‘d’) allegedly hailed from Nottinghamshire. A framework knitter’s apprentice, he had, the story ran, been criticized for making up his hose too loosely and was told to ‘square his needles’, the term used for adjusting the mechanism of the stocking frame. Ned took the injunction literally and flattened the workings of the machine with a hammer. Even allowing for the fact that the resistance of framework knitters in 1811–12 towards wide frames often involved them in smashing their workings with hammers, the choice of Ned’s name to self-identify the Nottinghamshire machine breakers was surprising, for he was hardly a heroic figure. It indicates at the very least a sense of self-irony which is remarkable. Yet in a very short time, even as his henchmen went about his business, Ned had become famous and was the subject of ballads and doggerel. Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood His feats I but little admire I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire.
Where Robin, a displaced gentleman, signified paternal protection, taking from the unscrupulous rich barons to give to the poor, Ned stood for the sturdy selfsufficiency of the independent labourer prepared to take on the role of resistance for himself. Furthermore, from the first, Ned Ludd assumed a clearly ideological and moral position of the righter of wrongs and the punisher of those who threatened community values: The guilty may fear, but no vengeance he aims At honest man’s life or Estate His wrath is entirely confined to wide frames And to those that old prices abate These Engines of mischief were sentenced to die By unanimous vote of the Trade And Ludd who can all opposition defy Was the grand Executioner made.⁶ ⁵ Gloucester Journal, 20 July 1812. The writer proved to be 15-year-old employee Thomas Gardner. At his trial the judge blamed the press rather than his innate depravity. The two mills referred to had been burned down but do not appear to have been deliberately fired. Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister, was murdered by John Bellingham on 11 May 1812. ⁶ HO 42/119, ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’. The song, sung to the tune of ‘Poor Jack’, dates from late 1811 or early 1812 since it was most probably bundled with a letter from Coldham to Ryder in January 1812. See Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 95–100 for a discussion of the song and its provenance.
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The fame of ‘Ned Ludd’s men’ spread.⁷ And when disorders broke out in neighbouring regions among entirely different trades, the name of Ludd spread with them.⁸ This no doubt reflected the positive response among workers in many regions to the image, established through press reports, of Ludd as the upholder of customary rights. However, the authorities feared a more sinister reason, seeing Luddites not merely as machine-breakers but as a secret conspiracy to overthrow the state. They were not without circumstantial evidence to sustain such a view. Credible, if sketchy, reports showed that delegates from the disturbed East Midlands visited groups of workers in both Yorkshire and Lancashire in early 1812 and maintained some correspondence across the regions. Others, unconnected with these industrial conflicts, and who had political change, including violent political change, as their object, were also conducting clandestine correspondence. How far ‘Luddite’ linkages tied up with these, how far the ‘industrial’ elided into coherent revolutionary plotting, or whether these meetings were simply the ordinary pattern of workers in dispute seeking support from other working groups beyond their region remain subjects of considerable historical debate.⁹ The single defining feature of Luddism was a common resistance to laboursaving technology. Indeed, the Luddite disorders have, uniquely among popular protests, bequeathed to posterity an adjective that has entered the lexicon as synonymous with a blind and unthinking hostility to technology and to change. As I have argued elsewhere, such a view, essentially a construct of Victorian industrial triumphalism, does less than justice to those involved in the protests and in many ways seriously misstates the Luddites’ attitude to machinery.¹⁰ Moreover, Luddism, though characterized as a movement against new labour-saving technology, was in fact a complex amalgam of protests shaped by their local industrial, political, and historical contexts. The common title disguises differing patterns of labour protest and differing contemporary understandings of the changing character of both industrial production and industrial relations. Each region demonstrated the ways in which popular protest had developed across the previous century. The Luddite disturbances did, however, share a common economic and political context which shaped both their development and the response that greeted them. ⁷ Nottingham Journal, 28 December 1812. ⁸ We might note that the Yorkshire rioters did not always describe themselves as ‘Luddites’. They also referred to themselves as ‘redressers’, which, given the fact that the trade concerned were cloth dressers, might again have been self-ironic, and as ‘ “snappers” as they call themselves’, according to a report in the Nottingham Journal of 24 March 1812. One is left to wonder whether the ‘Snappers’ would have made quite such an impact at the time or on posterity. What, indeed, is in a name? ⁹ For the best discussion of the linkages between the affected regions and the links with ultraradicals, see J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘Luddism and Politics in the Northern Counties’, Social History, iv(1) (1979), 33–64. ¹⁰ A. J. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991), 2–3.
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Following a period of rapid wartime growth, the economy was plunged into ever-deepening depression by the mounting consequences of the Orders in Council, initiated in 1807. These Orders attempted to wage economic warfare against Napoleon by establishing a blockade of the growing number of Continental ports controlled by France. At first the Orders had only limited impact: new trade with the Iberian Peninsula and South America grew apace, while the blockade was not well enforced. However, their impact offended the United States of America, which passed a Non-Intercourse Act in 1809, closing American ports to British vessels. This move was to have disastrous effects for both Lancashire cotton and Yorkshire woollens since both had developed significant markets in America. Protests against the Orders and against the war alarmed a government already seriously frightened of the possibility of internal revolt. And, with trade declining, the internal economy was hit as demand slackened. A speculative boom collapsed and unemployment rose everywhere. Compounding these distresses, the price of food rose inexorably when the 1810 and 1811 harvests both proved seriously deficient.¹¹ None of this made Luddism inevitable, but these circumstances heightened a sense of social and political crisis and brought the question of machinery to the fore. And they created the context in which industrial tensions might rapidly spill into riot. The Oldham diarist, William Rowbottom, presciently recorded in early January 1812: in Consequence of the Badness of trade and the Dearness of all sorts of provisions there is but Little apearance of Cristmas . . . the Lower Class of people . . . are absolutely Short of the Common necessaries of Life . . . if there be an alteration of times it must be for the Better Except there be Comotions or Civil wars wich God Grant may never happen in this Country or Kingdom.¹²
Let us examine the three disturbed regions in turn.
NOT TINGHAMSHIRE LUDDISM As noted, Luddism first emerged in Nottinghamshire. Yet in many respects the original Luddites fit the later paradigm least well, since the focus of the disorders in the East Midlands were not machines per se but threats to customary practices and to piece rates. The hosiery and lace industries, as noted earlier, were essentially putting-out trades controlled by urban hosiers who acted as merchant capitalists. In the cities and towns of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire production remained centred upon small master producers who employed journeymen in their shops. However, most hosiery and lace production by 1810 took place in the ¹¹ Across the manufacturing districts, concerns mounted for the labouring poor. For example, Bolton clergymen, manufacturers, and inhabitants petitioned against wage reductions and rising grain prices. HO 42/117, Pilkington to Earl of Derby, 12 November 1811, enclosing Petition. ¹² Oldham Local Studies Library, MF/G19, Rowbottom Diaries, January 1812.
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surrounding villages where ‘independent’ framework knitters were employed on piece rate. Few stockingers owned the frame on which they worked. Frames were complex and represented a significant capital investment. Most framework knitters therefore rented them, paying a weekly sum for which they were liable whether they produced hose or not. While the knitters liked to see themselves as artisans, they struggled to maintain any real autonomy.¹³ However, it was not entirely one-sided. The hosiers, like all merchant capitalists in putting-out industries, had little control over the rate of production. Additionally, their investment in rented frames was highly vulnerable to attack. Frame-breaking was therefore a means of putting pressure on recalcitrant hosiers, a tactic used in various disputes before the events in 1811. Three interlinked issues lay behind the disturbances that broke out in 1811. The first was a downward pressure upon piece rates, which reflected a declining market for hosiery and lace goods. The second was the fact that, in the boom years following the Peace of Amiens, a large number of people, not all previously connected with the industry, had purchased frames for rental income and thereby inflated the army of labour. These men were accused of being among the first to lower wages. Moreover, as with other weaving trades in this period, expansion had weakened the old customary controls upon labour. This was seen most clearly in the increasing numbers of female stocking weavers and apprentices, both of which undermined the trade’s capacity to maintain rates. Finally, custom was also increasingly undermined by the use of so-called wide frames. ‘Full-wrought’ stockings were made in the form of a tube. However, early in the new century a new form of stocking-making was developed using a wider frame, which enabled the knitter to produce cloth in one flat piece. Such frames had long been used, without dispute, to make, among other products, pantaloons and other forms of lace. They required a deal less skill and could be used by women and apprentices with little training. However, when these wide frames were used to produce stockings, they seriously threatened the framework knitters’ trade. Cut out from the cloth and then sewn up with a selvedge at the back, such ‘cut-ups’ were immediately denounced as a cheap inferior product. Moreover, framework knitters believed that such products were contrary to the Charter granted to the Framework Knitters’ Company by Charles II, which decreed that only ‘fullwrought hose’ might legally be produced. Indeed, the Charter provided a sanction, ordaining that frames making ‘spurious articles’ might be destroyed in order to ensure that hose was not deceitfully made. The Nottingham Review, in words which echoed the case that the shearmen had brought against the gig mill, noted in December 1811 that frames were being broken ‘not for being upon any new construction . . . but in consequence of goods being wrought upon them ¹³ Thomas Large, a delegate sent by the framework knitters to lobby for the regulation of their trade in 1812, was firmly put in his place on this point at a meeting of London artisans. Large to Committee, 24 April 1812, reprinted in D. Gray and V. W. Walker (eds.), Records of the Borough of Nottingham, viii. 1800–1835 (Thos. Forman, 1952), 143.
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being of little worth, are deceptive to the eye, are disreputable to the trade, and therefore pregnant with the seeds of destruction’.¹⁴ The earliest sign of discontent came in early 1811 in the village of Arnold. Framework knitters broke into workshops and removed the jack-wires from frames making cut-ups. It was an effective means of preventing them working without causing lasting damage to the looms.¹⁵ However, those hosiers manufacturing cut-ups were not prepared to compromise and on 11 March a large demonstration took place in Nottingham. ‘A number of individuals from the adjacent villages’ marched into the city ‘with a view of representing to their employers the hardships they were subject to and of intimidating others into compliance with their demands by which alone they can be enabled to obtain a subsistence.’ The magistrates called out troops but the demonstrators left quietly. However, later that day a large crowd assembled at Arnold ‘with a premeditated determination to destroy some stocking frames employed there by hosiers of this town’. Fifty frames were broken.¹⁶ In the weeks that followed more frames were smashed in the villages and towns around Nottingham. From the first, the attacks were well-ordered. ‘The persons engaged in these depradations proceed in small companies, disguised so that their persons may not be known.’¹⁷ These attacks persuaded hosiers in the town to call a public meeting on 26 March, which, while condemning ‘the illegal measures which have been resorted to by some of the framework knitters’, resolved to ‘recommend to the Trade in general to give for all full-fashioned work the OLD PRICES’.¹⁸ The agreement appears to have held for the summer but broke down as autumn moved into winter. Trade worsened, but again it was the increasing use of the ‘wide frames’ that occasioned disorder. The Duke of Newcastle noted that a new machine had been invented which enabled the manufacturers to employ women in many instances in which men had hitherto been employed; also the malcontents were looking to exacting greater wages than the manufacturers were able or inclined to pay them.¹⁹
In November frames were smashed at Arnold, Bulwell, and Baswell, as were a considerable number at Sutton-in-Ashfield owned by a hosier ‘who made for the most part cheap Grade at reduced prices, and paid for a considerable proportion of the labour in Goods’.²⁰ Trouble was expected since threatening letters had been ¹⁴ Nottingham Review, 6 December 1811. ¹⁵ W. Felkin, History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace (1867, 1967 edn.), 236. ¹⁶ Nottingham Journal, 16 March 1811. ¹⁷ Ibid., 23 March 1811. ¹⁸ Ibid., 30 March 1811. The hosiers also reiterated their determination to support the civil power who on the same day issued a handbill offering 50 guineas reward for evidence that resulted in the conviction of those smashing frames. ¹⁹ HO 42/117, Newcastle to Ryder, 16 November 1811. The Nottingham Journal echoed this interpretation: ‘The depredations have been almost exclusively confined to the destruction of a certain description of stocking frame which being of a new construction are supposed by the workmen likely to prove greatly injurious to the body at large.’ Nottingham Journal, 16 November 1811. ²⁰ Nottingham Journal, 10 November 1811; HO 42/131, Hayne to Ryder, 12 February 1812.
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sent to various obnoxious hosiers. Increasingly they bore a common signature. One of the earliest was to ‘Mr H . . . at Bulwell’, probably Edward Hollingworth. It warned: Sir, if you do not pull don the Frames or stop pay Goods only for work or m.. in full fashon my Companey will [vi]sit yr machines for execution . . . Ned Lu[d]²¹
On the night of 10 November, Hollingworth’s house was attacked. The marauders were initially driven off with gunfire and one attacker was killed. However, they regrouped and forced their way into the building where they smashed all the wide frames, though not standard frames, and all the household furniture in revenge.²² Attacks on wide frames now increased in both scale and extent. Some were quite open. A massed crowd marched from Arnold to Sutton-in-Ashfield to initiate frame-breaking there. Some city hosiers were so alarmed that they sought to retrieve their frames from the country knitters, an action which immediately increased anger since it deprived their previous hirers of all work. One such attempt was thwarted when the cart was intercepted and all the frames smashed on the roadside.²³ Within a fortnight, disorder had spread out to the framework knitting industry in Derbyshire and Leicestershire, while the villages around Nottingham were entirely convulsed.²⁴ Troops were rushed to the city of Nottingham and started night patrolling.²⁵ Newcastle was confident that their presence had put an end to disorders ‘in the neighbourhood of Nottingham’ but he remained concerned about outlying parishes.²⁶ There the military presence forced the Luddites to conduct their attacks in smaller parties: ‘The operations were conducted with so much secrecy and dispatch that the business was accomplished long before any force could be collected to resist them.’²⁷ But if the numbers in each action were small, the reach of ‘Ned Lud’s men’ was long.²⁸ At Beeston and Blidworth, the Luddites ‘placed men in the avenues to the Villages and declared they would shoot any man who attempted to go out to call the civil or military power’ before breaking ‘a great many frames’ and levying contributions for their support on householders.²⁹ Furthermore, the hosiers’ stratagem of bringing frames back into the city backfired: ‘they have had the temerity to extend their depredations even to the town itself ’, noted the Nottingham Journal, recording the destruction of attacks on frames in various locations in the city. Moreover, although the wide frames
²¹ HO 42/118, letter from Ned Lud. For details of this letter, see Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites, 73–4. ²² Nottingham Journal, 16 November 1811. ²³ Ibid. ²⁴ Ibid., 21 November 1811. ²⁵ Ibid., 23 November 1811. ²⁶ HO 42/117, Newcastle to Ryder, 26 November 1812. ²⁷ Nottingham Journal, 30 November 1811. ²⁸ Ibid., 28 November 1811. ²⁹ HO 42/117, Sherbrooke to Newcastle, 30 November 1811.
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remained their principal targets, Luddites now were smashing frames ‘as are employed at reduced prices, and in some instances, those worked by women’.³⁰ While direct action characterized resistance to wide frames and wage cuts, the knitters also maintained a more ‘public’ dialogue, aimed at publicizing their case and persuading their employers to negotiate. Some ‘Luddite’ statements made clear the anger felt against those hosiers who sought individual profit at the expense of the reputation of the trade and its workers. A poster, ‘Declaration: Extraordinary’, laid out charges against Charles Lacy, a Nottingham hosier, who stood accused of having ‘reduced to poverty and misery seven hundred of our beloved brethren . . . by making fraudulent Cotton Point Nett, of One Thread Stuff ’. Lacy, it was claimed, had profited by some £15,000 but in so doing had ruined the trade. ‘It appeareth to us that the said Charles Lacy was actuated by the most diabolical motives, namely to gain riches by the misery of his Fellow Creatures.’³¹ Other statements were more conciliatory in style. An ‘address from the framework knitters to the Gentlemen Hosiers of the town of Nottingham’ emphasized ‘we have nothing in view but a reciprocal Advantage in the Trade, both for ourselves and you.’ It sought their ‘best Advice, respecting an Address to Parliament, for the better Regulation of our Trade, and means of Defence against future Impositions’. The old pattern of combining the stick of direct action with the carrot of negotiative compromise was again in evidence. Such appeals to the employers were not without success. A meeting of hosiers in Nottingham in November resolved to amend the prices approved at the March meeting ‘more nearly to the wishes of the workmen and which, it was agreed, should be abided by and published’.³² Some hosiers in the plain silk trade agreed ‘to make a seasonable advance of 6d per pair their workmen in the manufacture of black silk hose.’³³ These actions prompted a public ‘Address’ from the workmen thanking their employers for their ‘ready condescension in attending to the solicitations of those Persons that waited upon you, on our behalf, to obtain the advance above specified’. The address listed those firms that had signed the agreement. The implication was clear: their property would now be exempt from attack.³⁴ However, the agreement could not be enforced across the trade. A further meeting of hosiers was called on 4 December. It resolved that, provided disorder ended, they would ‘receive and consider proposals from the workmen for the purpose of removing any grievances which may appear to exist’.³⁵ A copy of the prices agreed in 1805 was published in the Nottingham Review on 6 December.³⁶ Newcastle was hopeful that such agreements would put an end to the disorders.³⁷ Certainly violence abated in the immediate aftermath of these ³⁰ Nottingham Journal, 30 November 1811. ³¹ HO 42/119, ‘Declaration: Extraordinary’, November 1811. The poster ordered ‘our wellbeloved Brother, and Captain in Chief, Edward Ludd’, to execute Lacy. ³² Nottingham Journal, 21 November 1811. ³³ Ibid., 30 November 1811. ³⁴ Ibid., 29 November 1811. ³⁵ Ibid., 7 December 1811. ³⁶ Ibid., 6 December 1811. ³⁷ HO 42/118, Newcastle to Ryder, 29 December 1811.
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negotiations, but, when it became clear that many hosiers would ignore any agreement, it soon resumed. They go about in small parties, disguised, with their faces besmeared, and stationing centinels at the doors accomplish their purposes with the least noise. They communicate with each other by means of a watchword and the firing of a pistol or gun is generally the signal of danger or of retreat.³⁸
The problem of securing meaningful negotiation was exacerbated by the Nottingham corporation, which, no doubt under pressure from the hosiers, established a secret committee, consisting of leading civic officials and the city hosiers, to tackle Luddism. Armed with some £2,000 to offer as rewards, the committee pressed for more troops to coerce the disaffected. They also began a process of arresting suspects in the middle of the night, encouraging rumours that these men had been impeached by their comrades. This brought an immediate response from Ned Lud, who warned that that any person ‘giveing any information, of breaking frames to the Town Clerk, or to the Corporation Silly Committee’ would be ‘Punish’d with death, or any Constable found out making any enquiries so has to hurt the Cause of Ned Lud or any of his army, D E A T H (by order of King Lud)’.³⁹ While attacks continued, attempts to reach a negotiated peace continued. In late December the framework knitters of Melbourne published an address to the hosiers, reminding them of the agreement reached in May 1805 with 139 ‘honourable Hosiers’. And in early January ‘Ned Lud’s Office, Sherwood Forest’, issued a ‘declaration’ reminding all of the continuing validity of the charter granted by Charles II that empowered the destruction of ‘all Frames and Engines that fabricate Articles in a fraudulent and deceitful manner’. Ned promised to uphold this provision, though, interestingly, he disowned ‘Gangs of banditti’ who had allegedly ‘infested various parts of the Country under the pretence of being employed in breaking Frames and hath committed divers Robberies’. ‘I have Gave two thousand Pounds as secret money any person that will give any Information of the villainous and false rumours of the Frame Breakers.’⁴⁰ The fact that this sum matched the ‘Silly’ Committee’s fund was doubtless no coincidence. However, while Luddites sought to uphold an image of reasonableness, their inability to secure a lasting agreement always drove them back to industrial violence. By early January attacks had again become general. Even the sympathetic Nottingham Journal described the situation as ‘little short of a rebellion’ as attacks proliferated, frequently simultaneously, stretching the capacity of the numerous troops stationed in the county. Nearly one hundred frames, it declared, had been destroyed ‘within the last seven days’.⁴¹ ³⁸ Nottingham Journal, 7 December 1811. ³⁹ HO 42/118, Newcastle to Ryder, 21 December 1811; Ned Lud’s proclamation (n.d., 23 December 1811). ⁴⁰ HO 42/119, ‘Declaration’, 1 January 1812. ⁴¹ Nottingham Journal, 1 February 1812.
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Public opinion, subjected to a constant information diet of ‘outrages’, nevertheless remained far from hostile to the Luddites. Several correspondents openly condemned the hosiers. For example, John Wright declared that as a body, their conduct appears to be most reprehensible, tame and dastardly, through the whole of this dispute. They know and are aware of the extortion and tyranny of some of the hosiers combined with . . . a falling trade, was the original cause of the dissension and depredations.⁴²
Thomas Becher blamed hosiers who had failed to pay the rates agreed in the spring and argued for regulation of frame rent: I am aware of the delicacy attaching to any interference with regulations of trade, yet I beg leave most respectfully to submit for your consideration the expediency of passing an act to prescribe by a regulated table . . . the rent to be paid for every species of frame.
This would, he believed, cut out speculative production and closely connect the knitter with the hosier.⁴³ And even established hosiers, such as Thomas Hayne, were prepared to accept that that among their number were those who, by paying truck and seeking to reduce wages, were provoking the workers to anger. He was, though, more inclined to blame the number of frames hired ‘from Persons not connected with the Trade’ who rented frames simply as a speculative investment.⁴⁴ The Times was particularly critical of the local authorities’ failure to check the disorders: ‘There must be singular negligence somewhere or these disgraceful and dangerous proceedings would be put down at once.’ However, it also pressed for a meeting of master manufacturers ‘to consider the real demands made upon them by the workmen; and they should point their resolutions to meet as far as possible the actual distress of the quiet and industrious’.⁴⁵ Such was the public support for the machine breakers that, their £2,000 notwithstanding, the corporation was forced to admit failure. The Luddites were not only supported by those in work, Coldham, the town clerk, lamented: they had also won the hearts and minds of the community: They seem to have succeeded in such an astonishing degree that it is difficult to find out a person engaged in this employment who is not heart and soul embarked in it. They have lately exercised great Judgement and Discretion in the Selection of their Victims in the Town by fixing upon the property of Individuals on some Account Obnoxious to popular resentment.⁴⁶
In the main, Luddism was seen, as by Becher, as a trade dispute, albeit one that had got out of hand.⁴⁷ However, some magistrates and corporation members were disposed towards seeing more general dangers, while Newcastle, having initially ⁴² Ibid., 8 February 1812. However, he also blamed the editor for encouraging the Luddites by his criticism of the civic authorities. ⁴³ HO 42/120, Becher to Ryder, 11 February 1812. ⁴⁴ HO 42/131, Hayne to Ryder, 12 February 1812. ⁴⁵ The Times, 27 January 1812. ⁴⁶ HO 42/118, Coldham to Ryder, 14 January 1812. Coldham also acted as secretary to the joint committee. ⁴⁷ HO 42/120, Becher to Ryder, 11 February 1812.
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argued that the disorders were ‘entirely of a local and partial nature’, had by 5 February come to wonder whether there was a need for martial law.⁴⁸ The ministry was certainly thoroughly alarmed by what it saw as insurrection and was only too willing to respond favourably to the suggestion from the Leicester magistrates and Nottinghamshire MPs that draconian legislation was needed to bring the disorders to an immediate end. The result was the Frame Breakers’ bill ‘for the more exemplary punishment of persons destroying or injuring any stocking- or lace-frames or other machines or engines used in the frame-work knitted manufactory’. That exemplary punishment was, of course, death. Framebreaking was already punishable by up to fourteen years’ transportation under an Act of 1788, the result of an earlier bout of frame-breaking, a measure that, it was admitted on all sides, had proved completely ineffective.⁴⁹ Nonetheless, the Home Secretary, introducing the measure on 14 February, insisted that forcible action was needed since ‘every means had been resorted to’ to end the outrages, without effect. Ryder argued that Luddism was ‘a system bordering almost on insurrection’. ‘If the offences are allowed to continue, it would suffer great danger to the state.’ Bathurst made no bones about it: ‘The peace of the country would be cheaply purchased by the forfeiture of a few lives, in order to deter future outrages on the property of individuals, and the tranquillity of the state.’ While members of the Lords offered some resistance—Byron famously demanded, ‘Is there not blood enough in your penal code?’ while Grosvenor denounced it as an ‘obnoxious measure’ that would ‘inflict death on to anyone who should enter a house without force and merely damage a few threads of lace. Such a bill he could not contemplate without horror’—the bill became law by early March.⁵⁰ The Frame Breakers’ Act proved as ineffectual a tool of prosecution as its predecessor, an eventuality pointed out by Coldham before the bill was introduced: I have had a long conference with those who have given me most important information, and kept a watch upon the motions of the Framebreakers, and they will do so not a moment longer than the law is as it now remains. They cannot they say consent to act where the death of a fellow creature must be the consequence of their giving such information as may lead to his conviction.⁵¹
But while frame-breaking continued through February and even briefly into March, the Act, supplemented with additional troops, transformed the atmosphere in the East Midlands. The spectre of the gallows suddenly loomed large. The Nottinghamshire assizes heard five cases of riotous assembly and seven of frame-breaking though, since these offences had been committed before the new ⁴⁸ HO 42/117, Newcastle to Ryder, 16 November 1811; HO 42/120, Newcastle to Ryder, 5 February 1812. It was not a view shared by the two Bow Street officers sent to the city to assist the magistrates: HO 42/117, Conant to Ryder, 4 December 1811. ⁴⁹ 28 Geo. III, c.55. The Act in fact had never been successfully used. ⁵⁰ Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 21, 14 February 1812, passim; Nottingham Journal, 7 March 1812. ⁵¹ HO 42/119, Coldham to Ryder, 24 February 1812.
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Act, they had to be tried under the 1788 Act. Five men were found guilty: two were transported for fourteen years and three for seven years. The rest were acquitted.⁵² An uneasy quiet descended over the region. With direct action having failed, the framework knitters formally established a ‘United Committee’ to petition Parliament to legislate to regulate the trade. Signatures flooded in from around the county and a deal of lobbying took place at Westminster.⁵³ Persuading politicians was not helped by an attempt in April to murder a hosier, William Trentham. He was said to have cut the wages of two women workers and, when they complained, had sneered that they should ‘tell Ned Ludd’. Two men shot at him, hitting him but not fatally. No one was ever arrested for the crime.⁵⁴ Eventually a parliamentary committee examined the case and for a while the stockingers had some hope of success. ‘We have only Dr Smith’s Disciples to contend with whose principles are execrated all over the kingdom’, Henson, their leader noted.⁵⁵ But continued sporadic disorder in the county played into the hands of the hosiers. Coldham reminded Ryder: the Luddites ‘are not put down by the Terror of the Law, on the contrary they know that they have brought the terror of assassination in lively exercise upon the head of their employers’.⁵⁶ The bill was emasculated and then thrown out in the Lords. Sidmouth delivered the coup de grâce, noting that he hoped ‘that no such principle would be again attempted to be introduced in any Bill brought up to that House’.⁵⁷
YORKSHIRE LUDDISM Just as the disorders in Nottinghamshire were dying down, machine breaking broke out in Yorkshire. Here the conflict was much more directly that of man versus machine. The battle over the introduction of the gig mill having finally been lost with the repeal of the old regulatory legislation in 1809, the Yorkshire croppers faced their worst nightmare: the introduction of shearing frames, which would entirely destroy their trade. Frames had been creeping into the woollen districts around Huddersfield even as the parliamentary enquiries had been taking evidence in 1803 and 1806, but their take-up on a large scale was protracted, in part at least from fears of the retaliation that they must engender. William Horsfall had erected them in his factory at Otiwells in 1807,⁵⁸ but it was only from 1809 that others, such as William Cartwright, followed suit, installing them alongside every other new piece of technology in his mill at Rawfolds. Their competitive advantage might have mattered less had trade prospered. But with the onset of ⁵² ⁵⁴ ⁵⁶ ⁵⁷
Nottingham Journal, 21 March 1812. ⁵³ Records of the Borough of Nottingham, viii. 153. Nottingham Journal, 2 May 1812. ⁵⁵ Records of the Borough of Nottingham, viii. 157. HO 42/123, Coldham to Ryder, 2 June 1812. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 24 July 1812. ⁵⁸ Nottingham Journal, 9 May 1812.
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depression,⁵⁹ smaller master dressers found themselves being squeezed from the market since their hand-finished costs were much higher. Reluctantly they too were forced to invest in the machines. It was clear from January that trouble was brewing. In Leeds, the cloth-dressing centre of the West Riding, magistrates heard of a meeting of croppers, faces blackened and armed with hammers, which had resolved to take direct action and smash the proliferating shearing frames.⁶⁰ And when fire broke out at Oatlands mill, which housed gig mills, arson was immediately suspected. The Leeds Mercury noted, ‘The depredators have attacked Oatland’s mill near Leeds. . . . It appears that the recent riots and outrages in Nottingham have arrived in this county.’⁶¹ However, it was not until February that machine-breaking actually commenced. From the first, violence focused upon the villages south-west of Huddersfield, the centre of innovation in the West Riding woollen industry. On 22 February a crowd, one hundred strong and with blackened faces, forced their way into the dressing shops owned by Mr Hirst at Marsh and smashed shearing frames. They then did the same at Balderson’s shops at Crosland Moor. The party was armed with pistols, etc, and appears to have acted on a regular systematic plan, and with the most minute attention to the commands of the leader. Their first operation was to surround the premises in order to prevent any communication with the neighbourhood, and proceeded to destroy the obnoxious utensils. As soon as the work of destruction was completed, the leader drew up his men, called over the roll, each man answering to a particular number, instead of his name; they then fired off their pistols, gave a shout and marched off in military order.
Four days later the cropping shops owned by William Hinchcliffe at Leymoor were attacked and all his machinery smashed. Now thoroughly alarmed, the merchants and manufacturers in Huddersfield formed a committee to resist the ‘Luddites—the cant term used to describe the depredators’, as the Mercury recorded.⁶² Troops already in the district were immediately placed at the ready: ‘so much alarm prevails among the proprietors of gig mills, that a military guard is nightly stationed for their protection.’ A reward of 500 guineas was immediately offered for evidence leading to the conviction of the perpetrators.⁶³ A brief lull followed and then new attacks began, again centred upon Huddersfield. Frames and shears were smashed at Slaithwaite, Honley, and Crosland. The Luddites were determined but not impolite. Samuel Swallow deposed: ‘Between one and two this morning a number of people came to this house and began to demolish tools. They broke four pairs of shears, two shearing ⁵⁹ A meeting of merchants and manufacturers in the county in April 1812 heard that over £1,000,000 worth of cloths were lying unsold in warehouses. Wentworth Woodhouse Mss., F47/49, A statement in support of the petitions from the merchants and manufacturers, 13 April 1812. ⁶⁰ Leeds Intelligencer, 20 January 1812. ⁶¹ Leeds Mercury, 12 February 1812. ⁶² Nottingham Journal, 1 March 1812. See also Leeds Mercury, 29 February 1812. ⁶³ Nottingham Journal, 14, 21 March 1812.
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frames and one brushing frame, after their work of destruction was complete they asked for arms, after wishing goodnight, they left.’⁶⁴ Extensive workshops owned by Francis Vickermann in Huddersfield were attacked and thirty pairs of shears destroyed, along with cloths and other property. Vickermann had received a threatening letter a few nights earlier.⁶⁵ On the night of 23–4 March destruction spread to the Leeds district. Some forty men, again well-armed, forced their way into the shearing mill of William Thompson at Rawden, seized the watchman, and then smashed all the shearing frames. For good measure they also smashed the windows. From first to last the attack lasted only twenty minutes. In Leeds itself the workshop of Dickinson, Carr and Shand was entered and ‘eighteen pieces of fine cloth, dressed by machinery, torn and cut into shreds’.⁶⁶ Men with blackened faces broke into Mr Smith’s workshop near Holmfirth and smashed frames.⁶⁷ They then marched a mile to Horn Coat to Joseph Brook’s workshop where they destroyed his frames. Finally they marched to Honley where James Brook’s workshop contained a recently purchased shearing frame. He had already dismantled the machine, fearing retribution. The Luddites smashed it, but left all his other shears undamaged.⁶⁸ By early April most of those master dressers, who, like Brook, had felt the need to buy and set up shearing frames in order to compete with those with far greater capitals, had either taken down the machines or seen them smashed. Protecting these small and scattered workshops had proved impossible and the Luddites had been able to assemble, break in, and destroy the machines long before the authorities could react. However, the croppers were now left with far more difficult targets, namely the large mills that the new merchant-manufacturers had established, most of which housed significant numbers of shearing frames and gig mills. Their owners were the men who had led the successful campaign to repeal the old regulatory statutes in 1803–6. They had no intention of being intimidated by a group who, they believed, would soon become entirely redundant. The first of these strategic targets to be attacked was the large mill at Horbury, near Wakefield, owned by Joseph Foster. No Luddite attacks had taken place in this district and it is possible that Foster was too complacent. On the night of 9 April a large crowd, said to number three hundred, surrounded the mill, forced their way inside and destroyed frames, shears and cloth and broke his windows and their metal frames. The watchman was forced to lay on the ground with a gun at his head. Then they broke into the bookkeeper’s house and his family were treated most violently, they then set the house on fire. ⁶⁴ HO 42/121, examination of Samuel Swallow, 6 March 1812. ⁶⁵ HO 42/121, Radcliffe to Ryder, 17 March 1812, enc. ⁶⁶ Nottingham Journal, 4 April 1812. ⁶⁷ This was most probably the same ‘Mr Smith Shearing Frame Holder at Hill End’ who received the threatening letter noted earlier. See Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 208–9. ⁶⁸ Nottingham Journal, 28 April 1812.
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The damage was estimated at £700.⁶⁹ The attack ‘has spread alarm throughout this manufacturing district.’⁷⁰ Success encouraged the Luddites next to attack the large mill at Rawfolds, near Heckmondwike. Its owner, William Cartwright, was one of the most prominent manufacturers in the West Riding and someone who had made clear his intention to press mechanization to the utmost. He was well aware that his mill was a prize target and he had prepared thoroughly. He had turned the mill into a formidable fortress, erecting a breastwork of flagstones at the windows to allow a protected field of fire for the defenders. Every night soldiers were stationed there. Late on 12 April a large contingent of Luddites assailed the mill, trying to force the main doors with sledge hammers. Cartwright and the soldiers opened a withering fire upon them, with Cartwright being the most active. ‘The soldiers say they never saw a man fire and load so fast.’ Small arms fire from outside could not penetrate the mills’ defences and, with, casualties mounting, the Luddites resorted to axes to try to get the doors down. Briefly it looked as if they would succeed but, just as the defenders were fixing bayonets for a last stand, the attackers drew off. They left two seriously wounded men in their wake, John Booth and Samuel Hartley, but others too had been hit. Bloodstains were trailed for up to three miles from the mill.⁷¹ The failure of the assault did nothing to diminish popular support for the croppers. Indeed, the deaths the following day of both Booth and Hartley further embittered social relations since rumours suggested both had died under torture. ‘Vengeance for the blood of the innocent’ was chalked up on many doors and walls.⁷² A large crowd gathered at Halifax for the funeral of Hartley. To pre-empt similar popular expressions of grief at Huddersfield, Booth’s body was buried there very early the following morning. The incoming crowds found the town swarming with troops. ‘Huddersfield wears the aspect of a town under military power night and day.’⁷³ Attempts to secure information met with a wall of sullen silence. Rumours emphasized that the Rawfolds attackers had been drawn from across the woollen districts and many had clearly suffered gunshot wounds, yet no information on any of the perpetrators could be obtained. The Leeds Mercury noted, ‘We believe there is a very general disposition amongst the lower classes to view the actions of the persons engaged in this association with complacency not to say with approbation, this is the strength and life’s blood of the organisation.’⁷⁴ The frustration of the authorities increased: ‘all these outrages, and much worse, are perpetrated without the detection of even a single individual: and thus escaping, the offenders seem, as must naturally be expected, to increase in strength and daring.’⁷⁵ ⁶⁹ ⁷⁰ ⁷¹ ⁷² ⁷⁴
Leeds Mercury, 11 April 1812; Leeds Intelligencer, 13 April 1812. The Times, 14 April 1812. Leeds Mercury, 18 April 1812; Nottingham Journal, 28 April 1812. HO 42/122, Campbell to Grey, 16 April 1812. ⁷³ York Courant, 20 April 1812. Leeds Mercury, 9 May 1812. ⁷⁵ Leeds Intelligencer, 27 April 1812.
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Nevertheless, the defeat at Rawfolds made plain the croppers’ dilemma: they might successfully intimidate the smaller firms into abandoning the use of frames but, as long as the large factories like Rawfolds continued to use them, they would continue to exert pressure on master dressers either to reintroduce machinery and risk more violence or to face a complete loss of their trade. In desperation or anger, the decision was made to murder those who were behind the large mills. On 18 April an attempt was made to shoot Cartwright as he rode home from Huddersfield. The shots missed. Nine days later a second manufacturer was targeted. William Horsfall, owner of Otiwells mill at Marsden, west of Huddersfield, was fatally shot while riding from Huddersfield market to his home. Horsfall, a prominent figure in the special committee to combat the Luddites, had, like Cartwright, invested heavily in cloth-dressing machinery and had also strongly fortified his mill, even going so far as to set up cannon. The Leeds Mercury noted, ‘He had rendered himself obnoxious to a high degree to the machine destroyers, who knowing his premises were too well defended to justify an attack on his property, committed a crime on his person that will embitter every future day of their existence.’⁷⁶ He was also a leading figure in the local volunteer militia. He had made no secret of his contempt for the croppers and had allegedly claimed that he would ride up to his saddle girths in Luddite blood.⁷⁷ The failure at Rawfolds and the murder of Horsfall changed the character of Yorkshire Luddism. Attacks on mills gave way to raids for arms. The day after the murder, a master dresser who had already had his shearing frame smashed, Clement Dyson, was roused from sleep by men with blackened faces who told him, ‘General Ludd has sent us for your gun and pistol and we must have them immediately. . . . If you shoot any of us, your wife and children will be corpses in Ten minutes.’⁷⁸ Thereafter such raids proliferated, many highly orchestrated. A correspondent to Fitzwilliam noted the precision, intrepidity and dispatch with which the armed banditti regularly searched a populous village, a mile in length, for arms and took away six or seven without attempting to touch other property, firing repeatedly into houses and individuals who offer the least resistance with a promptitude and apparent discipline that no regular troops could exceed.⁷⁹
Those who acted for the authorities or who were presumed to be providing information to them also came under attack. Shots were fired at Allun Edwards of Huddersfield, who ‘rendered himself obnoxious to the incendiarists by the vigilant discharge of his duty’ as constable of the watch. The Colonel in charge of troops in Leeds was also targeted.⁸⁰ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸ ⁷⁹ ⁸⁰
Leeds Mercury, 2 May 1812; Nottingham Journal, 9 May 1812. F. Peel, The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plug-drawers (1880; Cass, 1968 edn.), 129. HO 40/1/1, Dyson to Radcliffe, 30 April 1812. Wentworth Woodhouse Mss., F45/117, Walker to Fitzwilliam, 13 July 1812. Leeds Mercury, 9 May 1812; The Times, 12 July 1812.
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The deepening bitterness of the working population against the manufacturers was matched by the growing alarm of the authorities that a civil war was at hand. The Leeds Mercury could not comprehend the attempts to murder employers, describing the crime as ‘foreign to the feeling of Englishmen, and so much at variance with the courage and humanity of our national character’.⁸¹ The proliferating rumours of drilling and secret oaths alarmed General Maitland, commander of the army in the region: ‘The terrible oaths bind the misled. . . . Such an evil combination of destruction can now only be met with an equal force for its preservation.’⁸² This was a view shared by the Leeds Intelligencer: There is certainly some hidden mystery in this business, not yet ready for development. Their partial insurrections form but a curtain to cover the horrible scenery preparing behind it. . . . It is a mere drilling of the people for a field day upon a larger scale. There is a dark, subtle and inevitable agency at work, seducing the ignorant and the inexperienced and encouraging the profligate and the abandoned.⁸³
Master dressers made no attempt to reinstate shearing frames. But the frames still working in the fortified mills pointed up the frustrated impotence of the croppers and may indeed have drawn increasing numbers into the ultra-radical fold.
LUDDISM IN L ANCASHIRE AND CHESHIRE Edward Thompson noted: when Luddism came to Lancashire it did not move into any vacuum. There were already, in Manchester and the larger centres, artisan unions, secret committees of the weavers, and some old and new groups of Painite Radicals, with an ebullient Irish fringe.⁸⁴
Luddism in Lancashire and Cheshire was by far the most complex and confused of the protests in the three regions. Here attacks on machinery took place side by side with insurrectionary conspiracies, radical proselytizing, and protests over the price of food. Cotton workers were in the van of all of these, but they were not alone. However, at the heart of the protests were the cotton weavers. In Lancashire and Cheshire, machine-breaking was directed against the power loom. Applying power to the one remaining major production process proved technically difficult. A powered loom had been invented by Edmund Cartwright around 1787 but it was not successful, and the attempt to introduce a revised version in Manchester in 1791 ended when the factory housing the looms burned down in suspicious circumstances.⁸⁵ However, further improvements meant that by 1811 a power loom to weave coarse calico at last became economically viable. ⁸¹ ⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁵
Leeds Mercury, 25 April 1812. Wentworth Woodhouse Mss., F45/112, Maitland to Fitzwilliam, 26 April 1812. Leeds Intelligencer, 27 April 1812. ⁸⁴ Thompson, The Making, 651. London Gazette, 20–4 March 1791.
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Larger manufacturers began to set them up in new weaving factories. The cotton weavers were seriously alarmed since the looms clearly foreshadowed the demise of domestic weaving. In a context of faltering trade and falling piece rates, they were in no mood to sit by and watch their conditions worsen further. Although the authorities were frightened that local weavers’ committees were being infiltrated by radicals who were orchestrating insurrectionary plots, a concern heightened by the increasing evidence of illegal oaths, weaver informants suggested that such links were limited. But there was one thing they were agreed upon: ‘they are determined to do away with those steam looms.’⁸⁶ Attempts to negotiate agreements with manufacturers to restrain their use failed.⁸⁷ Violence inevitably followed. In February Stockport manufacturers began to receive threatening letters and at least one attempt was made to set fire to Peter Marsland’s weaving factory, while on 20 March, in the middle of the night, men attacked the power loom factory owned by William Radcliffe. Windows were smashed and lighted torches thrown inside but they were extinguished before fire could take hold.⁸⁸ The Bolton magistrate, Colonel Fletcher, who ran an extensive spy network, informed the Home Office of a rumoured plan for simultaneous attacks on factories in Bolton, Stockport, and Manchester.⁸⁹ However, when disorders broke out in Manchester, they were occasioned not by machinery but by politics. Manchester Tories called a meeting at the Exchange to congratulate the Prince Regent on retaining the existing government on his assumption of the Regency. Reformers and radicals, disappointed at the Prince’s failure to dismiss the old Tory elite, determined to stage a counter-demonstration, urging, ‘Now or never! All those who do not wish for an increase in taxes and poor rates, for a greater scarcity of provisions and no work are called upon to speak for themselves.’ Fearing violence, the Tories called off their meeting, but a large radical crowd, assembled from as far as fifteen miles around the town, nonetheless gathered in the marketplace before marching to the Exchange. Rowbottom recorded that about one o clock the populace Begun to be turbulent and Begun to Demolish the valuable furniture and the windows Lamps and Chanliers fared the same fate . . . the Riot Act was Read and the Cumberland Militia and a party of the Scotch Greys put the mob to the Rout happily no Lives where Lost.
Some of the rioters, however, went on to attack Mr Schofield’s mill in Newton Street, which was said to contain obnoxious machinery.⁹⁰ ⁸⁶ HO 42/121, Warr to Fletcher, 21 March 1812. For an excellent account of the background to Luddism in Stockport, see R. Glenn, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (Croom Helm, 1984), 167–75. ⁸⁷ HO 42/120, Lloyd to Bulkeley, 11 February 1812. ⁸⁸ HO 40/1, Lloyd to Ryder, 21 March 1812; reports of Stone and Yarwood to Fletcher, March 1812; Glenn, Urban Workers, 170–5. ⁸⁹ His spies told Fletcher that 823 weavers had been sworn as Luddites and that some 250 of them were already armed. HO 40/1/1, Fletcher to Beckett, 6 April 1812. ⁹⁰ The Times, 11 April 1812; Rowbottom Diaries, 15 April 1812.
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The Exchange riot precipitated extensive disorder across the region. Much focused on the rocketing price of food. For example, on 13 April, Stockport spinners, together with colliers and carters from Bollington and Rainow, marched to Macclesfield, where, with local workers, they seized food in extensive disorders.⁹¹ However, the next day they turned their attention to the local weaving factories. The first to be targeted was the steam-powered weaving factory owned by Goodair and Co. ‘We had been for some days under great apprehension of the mob,’ Goodair’s wife recounted. At 9 a.m. a large crowd assembled before the factory at Edgley, throwing stones and breaking the windows. They then marched into the town and smashed the factory windows of other mills containing power looms, including those of Hindley and Bradshaw, Radcliffe, and Bentley and Co. They also smashed the manufacturers’ house windows and, in the case of Marsland, destroyed all his furniture. Then, over 3,000 strong, they returned to Edgley where they forced their way into Goodair’s mill and ‘destroyed the looms and cut all the work which was in progress’. Only the intervention of troops prevented the mills owned by Messrs Sykes from becoming their next victim.⁹² In the days that followed, workers toured the district, led by two men dressed as women and calling themselves ‘General Ludd’s wives’, attacking factory owners’ property and demanding food and money from houses they passed.⁹³ In Manchester cavalry patrolled the streets at night and constituted a strong presence in the day. Nevertheless, on 15 April food riots broke out in the town. They were to last for five days, while parties of the ‘disaffected and disorderly’ marched out into the country districts, searching out food stocks. Soon food rioting became extensive, many of the riots being led by ‘General Ludd’.⁹⁴ Attacks on power-loom weaving factories increased. On 20 April the factory owned by Daniel Burton and Sons at Middleton, ‘where machinery is used in great perfection’, was attacked by ‘an infatuated mob’ who fired guns into the factory. A withering counter-fire drove them off, fatally wounding five rioters. They then attacked the houses of Burton’s employees, destroying their furniture until cavalry drove them off.⁹⁵ The following day the attackers returned, supported by miners armed with picks and muskets with fixed bayonets. They carried before them an effigy of ‘the renowned General Ludd whose standard bearer waved a sort of red flag’. Again the mill’s defences held, but this time Burton’s house was destroyed before the military could intervene. Some days later, the firm issued a notice that they had ‘determined not to work their looms any more’. It was said that the insurers would not cover their losses.⁹⁶ At Stockport, as we have ⁹¹ HO 40/1, Lloyd to Ryder, 13 April 1812; The Times, 21 April 1812. ⁹² The Times, 17 April 1812; Nottingham Journal, 25 April 1812. ⁹³ HO 40/1/1, Lloyd to Ryder, 13 April 1812. ⁹⁴ HO 42/128, Clay to Home Office, 21 April; Fletcher to Beckett, 22 April 1812; The Times, 21 April 1812; Manchester Mercury, 21 April 1812. ⁹⁵ The Times, 23 April 1812; Nottingham Journal, 2 May 1812. ⁹⁶ Rowbottom Diaries, 20 April 1812; Leeds Mercury, 25 April 1812; The Times, 23, 24 April 1812; Nottingham Journal, 2 May 1812.
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noted, Thomas Garside received a letter from ‘General Justice’ warning him to take down his machinery.⁹⁷ He was already a shaken man. Just days before, as he had stood watching the attack on a neighbour’s mill, he had been noticed, denounced as a spy, stoned, and chased into a neighbouring cottage. When he tried to escape, he found himself surrounded and feared for his life until the ‘leader’ of the mob stopped them and allowed him safe passage. He found the power of the leader more frightening than that of the mob: ‘this attempt at murder was not the effect of passion—but in obedience to the command of their leaders.’ Manufacturers were facing, he wrote, ‘the most desperate and best organised conspiracy that the world has ever witnessed’.⁹⁸ With mobs everywhere and mills, both corn and cotton, coming under attack, his sense of beleaguerment was widely shared. Chippindale, the Oldham magistrate, warned Fletcher, ‘If more military is not sent into the country, they will not be called upon to protect it, but will be required to re-conquer it.’⁹⁹ However, industrial violence was coming to an end. On 24 April, rioters eventually succeeded in destroying the large mill at Westhoughton, near Bolton, owned by the firm of Wray and Duncuft, which housed some 170 steam looms. Fletcher’s spy ‘B’ had previously warned of imminent attacks but none had materialized. On the morning of the 24th, news of an attack brought the military hotfoot from Bolton but, finding no rioters, they left. Their withdrawal provided the chance for which the rioters had been waiting. They broke all the windows and then threw heaps of straw inside before lighting them. The mill was completely destroyed at a loss estimated at over £6,000.¹⁰⁰ The destruction of the mill effectually ended the ‘industrial’ phase of Lancashire Luddism. Thereafter the authorities, as in Yorkshire, coordinated their forces better to ensure that the largest mills had a strong military protection, while Colonel Fletcher orchestrated a mass roundup of suspects: by a well-conceived project, most judiciously enacted, their secret meetings were dashed into, their private signals obtained and by a patient and persevering duty of detachments of the Bolton Militia, their diabolical nocturnal assemblies were put into confusion, their papers seized and a very large number of their ringleaders . . . have been secured and sent to Lancaster gaol.¹⁰¹
Overt attacks on factories gave way to arms thefts, insurrectionary plotting, and clandestine drilling. Although one steam weaving factory had been destroyed and another taken out of commission, no concessions on the use of power looms had been won. ⁹⁷ HO 40/1, letter from General Justice, 19 April 1812. ⁹⁸ HO 42/122, Garside to Ryder, 21 April 1812. ⁹⁹ HO 40/1, Chippindale to Fletcher, 23 April 1812. ¹⁰⁰ J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (1911; Longman 1978), 228–32, detail the machinations of ‘B’; The Times, 30 April 1812; Leeds Mercury, 2 May 1812; Nottingham Journal, 2 May 1812. ¹⁰¹ Nottingham Journal, 9 May 1812.
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By the end of April 1812 machine breaking in all three regions had largely come to an end. In the East Midlands, where stocking frames were easier targets, some frame-breaking continued and the occasional attack was made upon shearing shops in the West Riding, but in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire the principal objects of Luddite hostility, the large factories, were by now too heavily defended to make further outright assaults practicable. In all three regions Luddism turned in on itself. Arms thefts, sturdy begging, and raids that combined physical assault, searches for food and sometimes common theft, proliferated, as did reports of drilling and revolutionary plots. To many observers, ‘industrial’ protests had turned into a rebellion aimed at the very state itself. The changing character of Luddite activity reflected the changing context in all three regions. A key element in each was the presence of unprecedented numbers of soldiers. From April onwards troops flooded into the disturbed districts to reinforce the already large garrisons. Historians, taking their lead from Darvall, have recorded that, by early May, an army larger than that which Wellington had taken to fight the French in the Iberian Peninsula now faced the Luddites.¹⁰² General Maitland commanded some 7,000 men in and around Manchester, of whom 1,400 were mounted troops, while Generals Dyott and Grey commanded armies of 4,000 and nearly 2,000 in the Midlands and Yorkshire, respectively. However, these were but part of the force available, since local militia regiments considerably augmented military strength. In Yorkshire, the militia totalled perhaps a further 12,000 men: in Lancashire and Cheshire they numbered roughly the same. That made, Reid estimates, perhaps 35,000 soldiers in all available to tackle disorders, a significant percentage of them mounted men.¹⁰³ And over and above these regular and irregular troops, the mobilized Watch and Ward and increasing numbers of special constables also maintained close observation of the streets.¹⁰⁴ In effect, large parts of the East Midlands and the industrial north were, by the end of April, effectively under martial law. Moreover, Maitland was not content to pursue a passive policy of defence. From the first he set out to overawe and overwhelm those creating disorder. His tactics were shrewd. He insisted from the first that troops were to be kept together, both for security and to reduce the risk of their being suborned or, worse, isolated and successfully attacked. He also made great show of the build-up of military might. When he took up command, he marched all his troops, some 7,000, through Manchester in full regimental order in a show of strength, an action ¹⁰² Sale, Rebels Against the Future, 148. ¹⁰³ Reid, Land of Lost Content, 151–2. ¹⁰⁴ For example, Rowbottom recorded, ‘two majestrates met at the Spread Eagle Oldham and swore in a Large number of Constables for the parish of Oldham & Ashton under Line And two Hundred of the Oldham Local Militia where Emdodyed for fourteen Days and the Rest of the Regement to be Cald on Duty in Rotation.’ In May the Watch and Ward was established: ‘they watched from nine at night till four in the morning the watchmen were provided with watch Bills Rattles Trunceons Swords pistols and Blunderbusses.’ Rowbottom Diaries, 27 April, 11 May 1812.
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which extended over three days. He used regular and irregular night and daytime patrolling to disconcert the disaffected and to reassure the loyal. These tactics were supplemented by ruthless anti-terrorist measures. One such was the establishment of what Reid calls ‘the first explicitly devised commando unit of the British army’. A large detachment of the Stirlingshire militia, led by a youthful dragoon, Captain Raynes, was tasked with harrying clandestine Luddite activity. Moving constantly around the hill country, lying up in the day and patrolling without regard to territorial boundaries when darkness fell, Raynes and his men sought out, attacked, and arrested any gangs of men out and about. He proved remarkably effective.¹⁰⁵ This aggressive policy of military pacification was supplemented by the detention and highly aggressive interrogation (and probable torture) of suspects, a practice followed by zealous magistrates such as Joseph Radcliffe of Huddersfield, John Lloyd of Stockport, and Joseph Nadin, the Manchester deputy constable. Soon men were being taken up in large numbers.¹⁰⁶ The spy network already in place run by local magistrates such as Fletcher and Nadin was supplemented with spies recruited by Maitland to infiltrate Luddite groups. Although their testimonies, often contradictory, merely added to the confusion in understanding the nature of the threat posed, there is no doubt that fear of spies increased the pressure on Luddite councils. All this meant that there was little chance that Luddism would simply fade away. Whereas earlier extended protests had been allowed to die down, Luddism was to be extirpated.¹⁰⁷ Such pressure, however, drove it further underground and into ever-more desperate resistance, evidenced by increasing attacks on their tormentors.¹⁰⁸ LUDDISM AND POPUL AR PROTEST Historians continue to disagree over the character and significance of Luddism. While all agree that its origins lay in distress and in hostility towards new, or modified, technology that threatened custom and employment, the development of Luddism after its earliest phases has been interpreted in very different ways. Thompson argued that Luddism marked a pivotal point in the emergence of class ¹⁰⁵ Reid, Land of Lost Content, 184. Reid provides a detailed account of Raynes’ methods: 182–6. Raynes left his own record: F. Raynes, An Appeal to the Public—containing an account of the services rendered during the disturbances in the north of England in the year 1812 (London, 1817). ¹⁰⁶ For example, Rowbottom noted, ‘last night Joseph Nadin Deputy Constable of Manchester arived at Midleton attended by a Large party of Scotch Greys and about one o clock this morning Broke into several Houses Secured people in there Beds he was provided with several post Chaises in wich he Emediately put his prisoners and drove off for the New Bayley.’ Rowbottom Diaries, 5 May 1812. ¹⁰⁷ Maitland warned Sidmouth that ‘we are shutting our eyes to an evil . . . from dread of trying totally to extirpate it.’ Counter-terror alone could break the Luddites. ‘I am convinced we can by this means terrify them into a sense of their own weakness.’ HO 42/126, Maitland to Sidmouth, 22, 24 August 1812. ¹⁰⁸ Among many attacks on magistrates and soldiers, we might note deliberate attempts to murder Colonel Campbell in Leeds in May and Radcliffe in October. HO 42/132, Campbell to Grey, 9 May 1812; HO 40/2/7, Acland to Maitland, 1 October 1812.
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attitudes. He saw Luddism as emerging from the ‘opaque society’ of illegal combinations and into outright opposition to the state: ‘Luddism was a quasiinsurrectionary movement which continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives.’¹⁰⁹ Thomis, on the other hand, saw little in Luddism to suggest that there was any substantive link to radical politics or to insurrectionary aspirations. Luddites, he argued, were not ‘would-be revolutionaries or the parliamentary reformers, the food rioters or the trade unionists. . . . They were rather the people who broke machinery as a deliberate, calculated policy.’¹¹⁰ Dinwiddy’s careful reassessment of the radical and insurrectionary dimensions of Luddism suggested that the two worlds of trade and politics did indeed become intertwined in the later stages of Luddism in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire, though he found no evidence to suggest that Luddism in the East Midlands shared this pattern.¹¹¹ Calhoun too argued that industrial conflicts increasingly became enmeshed with hostility to the state, but saw this as evidence of ‘reactionary radicalism’, a backward-looking resistance to change that had little in common with the progressive radicalism of the artisan supporters of Paine or Burdett.¹¹² There is certainly not space here to assess the wider significance of Luddism for nineteenth-century political and social relations. Nonetheless, the Luddite disturbances do pose questions concerning the changing nature of popular protest. For, while Luddism may be seen as emerging directly from that long line of Hanoverian popular protests which we have already examined, it clearly took on dimensions not seen previously. Not least of these were the sheer scale and longevity of the disorders and the way in which they grew ever more bitter. As we have seen, earlier industrial and subsistence protests had often proved difficult to bring under control. Food riots in 1766, 1795, and 1800–1 often continued to convulse a district for many weeks, while the Wiltshire Outrages in 1802 took several months to bring to heel. Yet none witnessed the same level of sustained disorder or proved so difficult to subdue as Luddism: historians agree that it was not until the Special Assizes and the mass hangings in January 1813 that the threat from General Ludd could finally be pronounced dead. Contemporaries clearly felt that Luddism constituted a real divergence from any former popular protest, which was one of the reasons that many believed that it must have ulterior intentions. Were the authorities, both local and national, correct in seeing Luddism as a new sort of protest? The Hammonds, Thomis, and Bailey suggest that they were not, regarding the authorities’ response as an overreaction to what was little more than a widespread but essentially old-style process of ‘collective bargaining by riot’. Certainly there were magistrates who were, as always, quick to be alarmed. ¹⁰⁹ Thompson, The Making, 604. ¹¹⁰ Thomis, The Luddites, 27. See the critique of this compartmentalist approach by F. K. Donnelly, ‘Ideology and Early English Working-Class History: Edward Thompson and his Critics’, Social History, ii (1976), 219–38. ¹¹¹ Dinwiddy, ‘Luddism and Politics in the Northern Counties’, 33–64. ¹¹² C. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1982), 60–72.
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The Frame Breakers’ Act, likewise, conformed to a knee-jerk reaction to disorder. Yet even those who were not inclined to cry wolf were from an early stage alarmed by the development of Luddite disorder. Moreover, we should acknowledge that many had good reason to be frightened. The hosiers who persistently refused to abandon cut-up production and the wide frame knew that they risked the loss of their frames. But attempts at murdering obnoxious employers indicated a new level of industrial violence in the East Midlands. More obviously, the new large factory owners of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire recognized that they were going to incur considerable public enmity when they introduced shearing frames and power looms. But they may not have expected the sheer fury of the response. The assault on Rawfolds, for example, was extraordinarily persistent in the face of overwhelming firepower and conducted with the military discipline of a force seeking to breach an enemy fortress—which is of course exactly how the factory was seen, with good reason. The scale and anger of the crowds who attacked the mills in Stockport took spectators by surprise. These attacks were in no way clandestine but took place in broad daylight. Moreover, the participants were not overawed by the army. The crowd that besieged Burton’s mill at Middleton in April was said number some 3,000 strong and they did not flee when, having set Burton’s house on fire, a troop of cavalry, reinforced by a large detachment of militia, belatedly arrived. The rioters simply withdrew to higher ground, awaiting battle.¹¹³ There was a palpable sense of violence in the air. Reverend Hammond Roberson, vicar of Liversedge, had looked forward to confronting the Luddites: he wrote in March to Radcliffe that he had had ‘good reason to think that we should have a visit from these croppers if we had not been prepared—as we are. I almost wish they would make an attempt, I think we should give a good account of them.’¹¹⁴ John Lloyd clearly revelled in the opportunity to engage the Luddites in (unequal) conflict.¹¹⁵ Luddism lacked, in all three regions, that sense of reciprocity which in the previous century had helped to alleviate conflicts, if only temporarily and symbolically. The violence of Luddism cannot be attributed to the participants’ lack of industrial organization. Contrary to Thomis’ view that Luddism reflected the weakness, or absence, of trade unionism, it is clear that those involved in all three regions were in fact surprisingly well organized.¹¹⁶ As we have seen, the croppers ranked among the most powerful provincial craft unions of the period, their position unassailable until the rapid expansion in the use of the gig mill some ten years earlier. Cotton weavers had demonstrated their ability to organize effectively across the region, as their petitioning campaign and strike of 1808 had shown.¹¹⁷ ¹¹³ HO 42/122, Clay to Ryder, 21 April 1812. ¹¹⁴ Bailey, The Luddite Rebellion, 47. ¹¹⁵ See, for example, HO 40/1/2, Lloyd to Ryder, 16, 18 April 1812. ¹¹⁶ Thomis, The Luddites, notes that, in Yorkshire, frame-breaking ‘occurred not through established trade union machinery but in its absence’. He also sees Nottinghamshire Luddism dividing cleanly between the machine-breakers and the trade unionists of the Framework Knitters’ Company: 133–7. ¹¹⁷ See Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution, 154–63.
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The framework knitters were perhaps in the weakest bargaining position of the three trades involved in Luddism, but, like the cotton weavers, they demonstrated how quickly they might be coordinated to bring orderly pressure to bear on their employers. Nor is it credible, in the light of earlier disputes, to divorce framebreakers from ‘trade unionists’. When in April the Framework Knitters’ Company produced a petition in favour of legislation for ‘preventing frauds and abuses in the frame-work knitting manufacture’, they were able to obtain over 10,000 signatures in a matter of days, which might suggest that the entire body of workers saw this form of approach as most likely to succeed.¹¹⁸ Yet, those same communities had remained rock-solid in support of the Luddites in the previous months, showing no willingness to impeach any of Ned Ludd’s men. Henson certainly made great play of his public criticism of machine-breaking. But he was hardly likely to praise Luddites, not least since he was well aware that many in authority believed that he was Ned Ludd. After the Frame Breakers Act, discretion was at a premium. One aspect of Luddism that gave the authorities particular cause for alarm was the proliferation of oath-taking, which occurred in all three Luddite regions, since they associated this with revolutionary intentions. Swearing oaths of loyalty to anyone other than the monarch was, of course, treasonable, a fact underlined by two Acts that followed the naval mutinies in 1797. However, loyalty oaths of some sort featured in many trade union initiation ceremonies throughout the eighteenth century. The cloth dressers’ Brief Institution certainly had an oath of loyalty that new members were required to swear. Thomas Bailey of Trowbridge deposed in 1802 that he had been required to swear ‘to be true to the shearmen and see none of them are hurt and not to divulge any of their secrets’. This same oath featured in the West Riding. The form of this particular oath was new, but Bailey had previously sworn another when he had completed his apprenticeship and joined the local society.¹¹⁹ The ‘Luddite’ oath that turned up across the disturbed districts was little different: ‘I will never reveal to aney . . . Person or Persons aney thing that may lead to . . . any Discovery under the Penalty of being sent out of this world by the first Brother that may meet me.’¹²⁰ Indeed, it was said to be similar to freemason oaths.¹²¹ Certainly, swearing oaths became a key part of the wider politicization of Luddism: when the spy McDonald sought to infitrate Luddite ranks in July 1812, his initiation was completed by being ‘twisted in’ in the Crispin Inn, Halifax, swearing the oath on the Bible, which had been specially brought. But, significantly, the man who conducted the process, John Baines, was ¹¹⁸ Records of the Borough of Nottingham, 144–5, 29 April, Henson to Committee. Henson noted in early May that ‘I can scarcely walk the Streets without being stopt to enquire how we are going on and when I go to Town again.’ Ibid. 146, Henson to Latham, 7 May 1812. ¹¹⁹ Randall, Before the Luddites, 133–4. See also K. J. Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland 1780–1815 (John Donald, Edinburgh, 1979), 162. ¹²⁰ Howell’s State Trials, 30, Rex v Eadon, 1070. ¹²¹ When an amnesty was offered in the autumn to those who had sworn illegal oaths in Lancashire, some thirty-two colliers came forward to abjure themselves. They do not seem to have been in any way connected with Luddism. Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, 271.
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a hatter, not a cropper, and an old ‘Jacobin’. As in 1802, attempts to infiltrate purely cropper ranks foundered since only another clothdresser could demonstrate the necessary credentials: an ability to finish cloth.¹²² This was why as ‘Luddism’ moved out from the trade to wider engagement, it became increasingly vulnerable to penetration. Rather than try to isolate Luddism within one of three different models of protest—industrial, radical, or revolutionary—we would do better to regard it as a changing mélange of protest in which all three elements were present in different degrees and combinations at different times and places. Yet, if Luddism in each of the three regions included such elements, it was in each also more than these. Luddism must be read as a purposive statement about the way in which those involved viewed and understood the changing world in which they found themselves. Kevin Binfield has properly directed scholars to the very rich text of Luddite writings as a means of gaining understanding of their mentalités. This approach emphasizes that the disorders were not just the desperate struggle for incomes in the face of displacement by new technology and economic hardship, though these were at the core. It also emphasizes the value systems and beliefs that lay behind the protests. It is noticeable that the rhetoric of Luddism in the East Midlands remained firmly embedded in the older patterns of moral economy. Here the industry was beginning to come under the sort of pressure that other outworking trades had experienced a decade earlier. Their discourse, Binfield notes, therefore continued to emphasize ‘a set of principles, previously sanctioned by the government but under threat at the time’.¹²³ That discourse was stated no more powerfully than in the song, ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’: Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice Nor e’er their assistance withdraw Till full fashioned work at the old fashion’d price Is established by Custom and Law¹²⁴
The East Midland Luddite disorders therefore may be seen as fitting into that earlier pattern of eighteenth-century protest that maintained what we might term dialogue through disorder. Their actions replicated methods that they had utilized in earlier disputes and that we have seen employed by other industrial workers: industrial violence of graduated character, combined with attempts to negotiate, or to use third parties to negotiate, with those employers deemed to be breaking custom. However, in 1811–12 this model did not prove productive for two reasons: the economic circumstances of depressed trade made finding a lasting agreement very difficult; and the local authorities were not prepared to press hosiers to agree to a more regulated model. Voluntary agreement foundered not ¹²² Maitland did attempt to find shearmen from the West Country for this purpose. It was not a success. HO 42/124, Maitland to Home Office, 17 June 1812. ¹²³ Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 32. ¹²⁴ HO 42/119, ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’.
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only upon the rock of underpaying ‘country’ hosiers, but also upon powerful city hosiers’ resistance to any compromise. The Nottingham committee in fact resembled those committees of merchants and gentlemen clothiers which ten years earlier had sought to free the woollen industry from the restraints of the old paternalist legislation. The framework knitters nevertheless oscillated between direct action and attempts to secure agreements with the hosiers, a model that had worked in the past. At heart they remained convinced that their moral economic model would be one that all could share. Paternalists and respectable sympathizers agreed that stockingers were being oppressed by the hosiers, but, significantly, even paternalists like Becher had abandoned hopes of regulation by the state. Henson was correct to see his enemy as ‘Dr Smith’s Disciples’. Moreover, the Midland disturbances showed from the first that the ministry had no intention of tolerating these disorders. While local magistrates, in particular the county magistracy, remained often surprisingly restrained in their dealings with Luddites, Nottingham and Leicester corporations pressed for more draconian measures,¹²⁵ a stance strongly supported by a central government that chose to see framebreaking as a threat to the very fabric of the state. It was indeed the ministry that pressed forward the Frame Breakers’ Act, even when advised by a hawk like Coldham that it would prove counterproductive.¹²⁶ Framework knitters, like woollen weavers, master clothiers, and cloth dressers in 1802–3, believed that they possessed constitutional protections, as evinced by the Charter, which must be upheld. As long as they retained that faith, it was less likely that Midland Luddism would develop a strong radical or revolutionary dimension. In April–May 1812 the Framework Knitters’ Company made great efforts to lobby their county and borough members at Westminster, seeing this direct link into the legislature as the most effective means to further their case once it became obvious that direct action was counterproductive.¹²⁷ That engagement within the parliamentary process, the hope that local members could provide relief, may well have dissuaded many from listening to the radicals’ arguments. That was not to last. But a residual confidence in moral economic arguments shaped the character of East Midland Luddism. In Yorkshire, as Binfield has shown, Luddite discourse was of a different character entirely. While Ned Ludd in Nottinghamshire sought to find common ground with the ‘gentlemen’ hosiers, General Ludd’s pronouncements in Yorkshire carried a far more coercive and menacing tone. Again, this reflected the local history. The failure of the croppers and master clothiers to persuade Parliament to sustain the old regulatory legislation had changed the context of their discourse. Here the champions of unrestricted mechanization had triumphed. Entrepreneurs like Cartwright and Horsfall made no secret of their determination to press ahead with machinery, seeing the repeal of the old legislation as symbolizing a new ¹²⁵ The link between municipality and trade was strong. George Coldham, town clerk of Nottingham, also acted as the secretary of the hosiers’ association. ¹²⁶ HO 42/119, Coldham to Ryder, 24 February 1812. ¹²⁷ Records of the Borough of Nottingham, viii. 146–7.
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relationship. For them the old reciprocity between master and journeymen, between merchant and master clothier, was dead. The power of capital now knew no constraints. So the Yorkshire croppers were under no illusion about what they faced. Direct action was now the sole weapon in their armoury, for there was no point in persisting in a dialogue with no listeners. At first the old model of direct action and threatening letter, previously seen in the disorders in 1802, proved effective enough. However, defeated by the fortified mills, some frustrated croppers turned towards murder. Others fell into the arms of the radicals like Baines, still others turned towards the insurrectionary schemes that had rumbled around the Riding since the United Englishmen’s plots of 1801.¹²⁸ As this happened, Binfield notes, the language of Yorkshire Luddism ‘shifted from threats against employers . . . to threats against the local authorities for counteracting the machine-breaking campaign . . . Rather quickly the focus on Yorkshire Luddite rhetoric began to concentrate upon a politico-economic system that was manifested locally in a highly visible and active form.’¹²⁹ The tone of discourse in Lancashire and Cheshire, Binfield, notes, was different again, being grounded within three discursive fields: the petition; the language of political economy; and the language of Jacobinism. He also noted that threats, direct and oblique, were even more characteristic of ‘north-western’ Luddism than of either of the other two regions. He interprets this combination as arising from the lack of a distinct collective identity. This analysis, drawing heavily upon Bohstedt, is not entirely convincing. Binfield argues that the ‘relatively new industrial population’ of the region precluded any incorporation of the ‘structured rhetoric of custom and law into an array of protest’ since, in contrast to the Luddites elsewhere, cotton workers ‘lacked the long-standing traditions of collective activity, organic identity, and social practice that would have been imparted by an ancient and communitarian trade . . . and would have enabled them to claim their customary rights through traditional procedures’.¹³⁰ This is not sustainable. Manchester, Bohstedt’s ‘city of strangers’, housed very well-organized and articulate cotton workers unions, as Charlesworth has noted.¹³¹ The growing towns around, such as Oldham and Stockport, did the same, while, county-wide, the cotton weavers had recent ‘union experience’ unrivalled by any other weaving group in the country. The surprising thing in many ways was not how difficult it was to develop a sense of custom among the weavers, given the rapid expansion of the industry, but the speed at which newcomers acquired notions of customary rights and ‘traditions’. However, the dialogue of disorder needed a reciprocal response to work. There is little evidence that, after 1804, anyone in authority was listening, except to spies and agents provocateurs. Here the bench had nearly shed its residual links to a rural and commercial past and was becoming dominated by ¹²⁸ On the United Englishmen in the county, see J. L Baxter and F. K. Donnelly, ‘The “Black Lamp” in Yorkshire, 1801–2’, Past and Present, lxiv (1974), 112–23. ¹²⁹ Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 49. ¹³⁰ Ibid. 36, 34, 33. ¹³¹ A. Charlesworth, ‘From the Moral Economy of Devon to the Political Economy of Manchester, 1790–1812’, Social History, xviii (2) (1993), 205–17.
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manufacturers. Their language was the language of political economy, a language to which their workers had to listen daily. So, if Luddite discourse here contained more echoes of this language than elsewhere, it reflected the lived reality of life in the industrial revolution’s fast lane. The form of Luddism in the cotton districts was also far more ‘mixed’ than elsewhere and far more overtly confrontational. In terms of the attacks on the mills, the character of the mass assemblies smacked more of open rebellion against an occupying power than of attempts at collective bargaining by riot. Rioters here showed little sign of fear of recognition or of early military presence. In this respect, the disorders showed a clearer parallel with the food riots that had engulfed the region twelve years earlier than with industrial disputes elsewhere. That said, the mass presence and firm determination to smash technological threats to their trade in 1812 clearly echoed the earlier attacks upon the large jennies. This region had also been in the van of a developing radical and revolutionary presence since the mid-1790s and the methods of secrecy and organization that characterized their councils were adapted by the secret committees of weavers after 1808. It is therefore little wonder that the utterances of the manufacturers and justices in 1812 sound more like those of later colonial planters and magistrates faced with a native uprising than those of their peers elsewhere. They were experiencing, as traumatically as their workforce, the consequences of a very rapid industrial transformation that treated the unwary capitalist every bit as ruthlessly as their workers. Yet, if Luddism in the North-west differed in some respects from that elsewhere, like the other two regions it was characterized by a community rather than just a ‘trade’ response. In all three regions a wall of silence greeted the authorities and was not broken until they began to use ferocious counter-terrorist measures. Although machinery threatened specific trades, entire communities sided with those whose incomes were at risk. This solidarity even extended to participation in Luddite attacks. For example, neither of the two men fatally wounded in the attack on Rawfolds were croppers or even engaged in the woollen trade, while, only two of those killed in the battle with troops that followed the attack on Burton’s mill were cotton workers: two were miners, the rest being a baker, a joiner, and a glazier.¹³² What, therefore, can we conclude about the significance of Luddism for the development of popular protest? I would argue that the Luddite disturbances marked a decisive sea change in the relationship between the crowd and the authorities. If the pattern and pace of change varied from region to region, in each we can see the demise of the old dialogue through disorder model that had characterized so many popular protests previously. Luddism exposed a new ferocity on the part of the state and local authorities when faced with disorder, a ferocity that in turn engendered fiercer resistance on the part of the protestors. Historians have seen in that changed stance the fear of insurrection that had gnawed at the self-confidence of the English ruling ¹³² HO 42/122, Clay to Ryder, 20 April 1812; Rowbottom Diaries, 20 April 1812.
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class since the earliest days of the French Revolution. Certainly, the old model for crowd control and riot management required the local authorities to demonstrate a sangfroid in the face of disorder that was harder to sustain when images of the sanscullotes danced before their eyes. The perceived ‘threat from within’ from ‘the swinish multitude’ clearly fuelled reaction to industrial protestors in 1811–12. That said, the sea change was not just, or even primarily, I would suggest, one fuelled by concerns about civil order or the maintenance of the English ancien régime. As in the case of the food market and in earlier conflicts over industrial regulation, the change was also ideologically driven. Luddism, its causes and its treatment, owed as much to the ‘Dr Smith’s Disciples’ and their faith in free markets as to the lurid concerns of Mr Burke’s successors for the preservation of the ‘mighty oaks’. This was, of course, the view taken by Edward Thompson. He argued that Luddism arose ‘at the crisis-point in the abrogation of paternalist legislation, and in the imposition of the political economy of laissez-faire upon, and against the will and conscience of, the working people’.¹³³ If that process occurred earlier in the cotton districts than in the East Midlands, the same factors drove the pattern of events both there and in Yorkshire. In all three regions those who became involved in the disturbances—and they included, as we have seen, large numbers not directly or immediately threatened by mechanical innovation—had been, or continued to be, engaged upon a defence of customary production modes and models that not only provided them some autonomy and security in their lives but that were, they believed, protected by constitutional rights. The rejection of these industrial moral economies, and the permitted and assisted imposition of ‘engines of mischief ’, undermined a social contract that had underpinned social relations for a century. Ned Ludd, like Robin Hood, epitomized a rejection of the law of the jungle where the rich and powerful might ride roughshod over the rights of lesser mortals. But where Robin might have looked forward to the return of a kingly monarch to right the balance, Ned could have no such hopes from the Hanoverians. George III’s ministers were the authors of their misery. Any lingering hopes in the greenwood trees and moors were shattered in February 1812 when the Prince Regent, at last assuming the power of the Crown as his father was officially pronounced mad, chose to retain the present ministry. Nedd Ludd Clerk informed Mr Smith that The immediate Cause of us beginning when we did was that Rascally letter of the Prince Regents to Lords Grey & Grenville, which left us no hopes of any Change for the better, by his falling in with that Damn’d set of Rogues, Perceval and Co to whom we attribute all the Miseries of our Country.¹³⁴
The assassination by a madman, John Bellingham, of that damn’d rogue Perceval on 11 May was greeted with rejoicing across the country. In Nottingham, for example, when news arrived, ‘a crowd assembled with a band of music’ and paraded the streets for fully two hours, leading public rejoicing.¹³⁵ ¹³³ Thompson, The Making, 594. ¹³⁵ Nottingham Journal, 16 May 1812.
¹³⁴ HO 40/1/1, Ned Ludd Clerk to Mr Smith.
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Luddites, and workers elsewhere in the country, were not alone in lamenting the brutal death of that sense of reciprocity which had been deemed to sustain the paternalist social model. Byron, having ventured for the first time into the Lords to deliver a rebuke against the Frame Breakers’ Bill, penned the following verse in a poem published in the Morning Chronicle: Some folk for certain have thought it was shocking When famine appeals, and when poverty groans; That life should be valued at less than a stocking And breaking of frames, lead to breaking of bones.¹³⁶
Yet, if paternalists looked askance at the harsh response to ‘starving’ men, those at whom the bill was framed were considering a different lesson: Well dn, Ned Lud, your cause is good, Mk Perceval your aim, By the late Bill ’tis understood, ’Tis death to break a fram. With dextrs skll the Hosiers kill, For they are quite as bad, To die you must by the late bill, Go on my bonny lad. You may as well be hangd, for death As brkng a machine, So now my lad, your sword unsheath, And make it sharp and keen. We’re ready nw your cause to join, Whenever you may call, To make foul blood run fair and fine, Of tyrants grt and small.
Beneath the poem, there was this postscript: PS Deface this who dare, Shall have tyrants fare, For Ned’s Every where, To both see and hear.¹³⁷
Even after Luddism had been brutally suppressed, the fear that ‘Ned’s Every where’ was to suffuse the next thirty years.
¹³⁶ Morning Chronicle, 2 March 1812. ¹³⁷ The poem has two versions, that in HO 42/123, which Binfield notes ‘appears to be in the handwriting of a Home Office clerk’, and another in Nottingham Archives M297. Binfield argues persuasively that this is the earlier version. Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 129–32. I have used the earlier version here.
12 Riotous Assemblies When tumults are once begun, no man knows where they may end. Robert Walpole¹
There can be little doubt that the eighteenth century proved to be an age of riot. As this study has shown, riots occurred with regularity throughout its succeeding decades. They could be found in all the English regions, involving a very wide range of people and occupations. Each disturbance had its specific ‘trigger’ and in each case the individual ‘targets’ of the crowd varied. Yet, with the exception of the ‘hired’ election mob, it is possible to discern across them all common characteristics. The first and central characteristic was what Edward Thompson, in the context of the food riot, called a ‘legitimising notion’. Throughout this study, we have seen how rioters frequently demonstrated a firm belief that their actions were justified. Thompson argued that food rioters were not simply reacting to hunger but were acting in accordance with a concept of a moral economy, an ideological value system based upon ‘a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’.² We have seen that, in the context of the food riot, Thompson’s case holds up well to critical scrutiny, while the conflicts over market measures also reflect moral economic attitudes. Did values of a moral economy extend beyond the food market and inform a wider ideological conflict between ‘customary society’ and a fast-developing capitalist economy? Edward Thompson was by no means inclined to make this leap, though we might note that he had used the term far more widely in his earlier work, referring to ‘the moral economy of the “trade” ’ when discussing Luddism, and noting that the small master clothiers of Yorkshire in 1803–6 ‘had at their backs a general theory of moral economy’.³ In his essay, ‘The Moral Economy ¹ W. Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (1803), viii. 1306, 14 March 1733. ² E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, l (1971), 78–9. ³ E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Gollancz, 1963; Penguin, 1968) 601, 599.
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Reviewed’, he expressed concern that the concept was becoming detached from its original locus, the marketplace, fearing that, by so decoupling it from the regulatory regime governing the marketing of food, it would be diluted to the point of vacuity. Indeed, he was particularly fierce on those who had taken up the idea as a shorthand for a general system of ‘values’ underpinning the ideology of the eighteenth-century poor: if values, on their own, make up a moral economy, then we will be turning up moral economies everywhere. My own notion of the moral economy of the crowd in the food market includes ideal models or ideology (just as political economy does), which assigns economic roles and which endorses customary practices (an alternative ‘economics’), in a particular balance of class or social forces.⁴
He was ‘more than half persuaded’ by this author’s use of the moral economy in a comparison of the actions and motivations of weavers in Gloucestershire engaged in the years 1756–66 in both food riots and industrial disputes, mainly because he recognized that in both the weavers were able to draw upon the hard points of legal authority to legitimate their actions and behaviour: Of course, these workers were habituated to an economy with markets, but markets conducted within customary norms; in times of conflict they affirmed the priorities of ‘the Trade’, or they elevated the defence of the interests of the working community above those of the profits of the few, and if the term ‘moral economy’ helps us to identify those norms and practices, then let it be used.
But it was not entirely a ringing endorsement.⁵ However, while recognizing the dangers of diluting a powerful conceptual apparatus, this study had shown that underpinning popular protest in the eighteenth century there was indeed a common and sustainable ideology that went beyond the food rioting crowd. For example, one of Thompson’s key delineations of the moral economy of the crowd in the market was that it drew upon strong legal precedents to legitimate popular expectations of farmers, dealers, and justices. But law, especially common law, provided underpinnings for other expectations too. In the industrial context, labour could appeal to the ancient laws covering apprenticeship and to specific regulatory acts which covered certain trades, such as those which determined the number of looms which might be owned and worked, how weft should be measured out, or to the general, and unavailing, proscription of truck. These were reinforced by memories of formal agreements that had been thrashed out, sometimes through Parliament and sometimes with the local justices, in earlier conflicts. For example, in 1732 journeymen clothworkers in the capital presented the Lord Mayor with a petition, seeking his ⁴ E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin, 1991), 339–40. ⁵ Ibid. 338–9; A. J. Randall, ‘The Industrial Moral Economy of the Gloucestershire Weavers in the Eighteenth Century’, in J. Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 1750–1850: The Formative Years (Longman, 1988), 29–51.
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ruling in a conflict with their employers over wage rates for overtime. He duly deliberated and ruled, though later, when a recalcitrant master’s house was set on fire and the dispute again flared, he ‘washed his hands of the petition’ and handed it to the Clothworkers’ Company to resolve.⁶ The trades in particular had very long memories of their own histories and were able to quote chapter and verse of earlier agreements. A powerful expectation existed in many, no doubt stretching back to Elizabethan times, that the local and national authorities could be called in to arbitrate when conflict broke out. Dobson, writing of the 1760s, notes that ‘Conciliation in industrial disputes was now a major part of a magistrate’s duties.’⁷ If that model was becoming increasingly anachronistic outside London, the Spitalfields Act of 1773 gave it new life and stimulated demands for similar regulatory legislation from other trades. ‘Dr Smith’s Disciples’ preferred to ignore the fact that this legislation proved remarkably successful in ensuring relative industrial harmony in the capital after an era of significant and violent popular protest, and without obviously harming the trade. The Cotton Arbitration Act saw the principle carried forward, if in attenuated form, into the new century. Similar notions of legal rights underpinned other forms of protest. The hostility to turnpikes was informed by a strong, and correct, belief that passage on the highway was free and protected under the common law. When commissioners waved a new act before them, announcing their right to privatize the highway, this seemed to the small farmers, dealers, and higglers to fly in the face of common sense and to smack of nothing more than political chicanery. This is why those protesting against the turnpikes around Bristol described them as ‘a thing Clandestinely purchas’d’.⁸ The rumbling hostility towards the press gang was likewise informed by the strong belief that the free-born Englishman had the right to protection under the law from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. The crimp house riots in London in 1794 demonstrated that, while in seaports the transparent operations of the press gang would continue to be grudgingly tolerated, the kidnapping or forcible seizure of the ‘innocent’ would not.⁹ Moreover, the very concept of the ‘free-born Englishman’ was underpinned by a much-vaunted set of legal rights which were upheld by the Constitution. If ‘political’, all had practical and economic importance for the poor.¹⁰ When, in the early 1790s, Thomas Paine argued that these were but a chimera, based upon a ‘sepulchre of precedents’, his claims were roundly condemned by those brought up upon a diet of ‘rights’. Ironically, one of the rights that did indeed provide an underpinning for the freedoms of the Englishman, habeas corpus, had to be suspended to prove Paine’s point. The law, of course, like custom, could be read in differentiated ways and was subject, again like custom, to constant contestation. It was not without irony that, ⁶ R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A Prehistory of Industrial Relations 1717–1800 (Croom Helm, 1980), 75–6. ⁷ Ibid. 89. ⁸ GRO, D15/2, ‘The Colliers Letter to the Turnpike’, 3 July 1727. ⁹ J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (Longman, 1979, 1992 edn.), 209–10. ¹⁰ See pp. 17–18.
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in an age when bills proposing the death penalty for felonies were passed almost as a matter of routine, the people at whom these bills were aimed should see the law as one of their defences. Nevertheless, Britons remained a protesting people throughout the century, sustained by a rich sense of legal precedent. That sense of legitimacy was proclaimed through the prominent role accorded in riots to the ceremonial. The use of ceremony reflected an appropriation of the methods of their rulers. Ceremony reinforced the power and authority of the state and the wealthy: the robes and the processions of judges at assize, the parades of victorious armies, the solemnity and formalism of trial, the javelin men accompanying the High Sheriff, the chairing of the member, all bore witness to the legitimacy and significance of their proceedings. The riotous crowd in turn had its own forms of display: the role of the horn aped the gentlemen’s hunt, hallooing the rioters as the hunting horn hallooed the pack; the torn bolting mill cloths and trophies seized from their enemies took the place of the more formal flags carried by regiments or political factions; the beat of the plebeian drum echoed those of the marching military and the victory parades with which the state celebrated famous victories. Issuing from the mob, sounds and symbols that normally stirred feelings of patriotism and pride were transformed into sources of alarm. Farmers and dealers in particular came to dread the sound of the horn whenever food riots broke out: it signified approaching trouble. The juxtaposition of patrician and plebeian demonstration was most clearly seen in the Cider Tax protests in 1763, but the use of these quasi-theatrical forms was ubiquitous. At Norwich in 1740 perambulating crowds were summoned ‘by Sound of Horns’, while ‘A Mobber’ was alerted in 1766 ‘by the sound of a horn and the huzza of a multitude’ that a riot was imminent. Protesting silkweavers in 1764 paraded ‘with drums beating and banners flying’, while at Tetbury in 1768 demonstrators announced their arrival in the marketplace ‘with drums and trumpet, bells and bonfire’. The country people of Somerset marched, ‘with drums beating’, behind no fewer than three drummers to attack turnpike gates in 1749. Striking seamen in London in 1768 promenaded behind their flags to the beat of the drum. Tiverton woollen workers that paraded the town in 1724 carried a large silk flag bearing images of the Duke of Cumberland and George II. The crowd that attacked mills near Dewsbury in April 1740 were led by drums. The Gordon rioters decked themselves with blue cockades and carried flags and the mob who disrupted the Coventry election in 1722 marched to both drums and trumpets. The small crowd that marched to show solidarity with the boy taken up for throwing stones at a Catholic chapel in Stoksley in 1739 did so with drums beating and flags flying. Drums, horns, trumpets, and flags provided the visual and oral signals to attract support and to intimidate opponents. However, the role of ceremony went further, emphasizing both the transparency of the crowd’s actions and their orderly public condemnation of actions and behaviour not tolerated in a customary society. Ceremony was often deployed in industrial disputes to emphasize breaches of custom. In the main the ‘victims’ of such actions were transgressing
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workers, but the message was also aimed at those who had seduced them from their collective responsibilities. For example, on the morning of 1 June 1792, a crowd of some fifty weavers assembled in Uley, a small Gloucestershire weaving village. They gathered outside the cottage of John Teakle, a narrow weaver, and accused him of ‘working under price’. Teakle denied this, though later evidence clearly showed that he was working for either 9d. or 91⁄ 2 d. per yard as against 11d. per yard, the standard rate. The crowd forced Teakle to remove the chain from his loom and carry it with them to the workshops of his employer, Nathaniel Lloyd. Refusal, he was warned, would result in his house being pulled down. However, when they arrived at Lloyd’s shops, they found that he was absent and that his wool-loft man, apprised of their coming, had locked up. Lloyd’s brother-in-law, George Harris, himself a clothier, came to parley with the mob, denying that the work had been given out underprice, and insisting that Teakle must take back the cloth and finish it. The weavers were equally adamant that the work was underprice and that it should not be taken back. They threatened that, unless Lloyd agreed to give full price, they would return and ‘not one stone of that house should be standing one upon the other by tomorrow 2 o’clock’: ‘if work was not worth 11⁄4d. per yard, it should not be wove in their parish for less than 11d.’. Teakle’s half-finished cloth was thrown on the ground and the mob threatened to kill anyone who removed it. However, after they had gone, Teakle’s wife picked it up and took it to the cottage of her brother-in-law, William Webb, who lived next door to them. Leaving Lloyd’s yard, the mob dragged Teakle to a local public house and drank some beer, whilst some of their fellows obtained a stinge, the large pole used for transporting finished cloths. Then Teakle was forced to straddle the stinge and was carried in mock ceremony towards Owlpen where he was ducked in a mud hole. This was the traditional manner in which Gloucestershire weavers humiliated blacklegs. Then, stopping at various alehouses to refresh themselves, the muddied Teakle was paraded on the stinge through Horsley and Nailsworth. Finally, well the worse for drink, they brought him home. Their good humour did not last long. Discovering that Teakle’s wife had repossessed the cloth, the mob insisted that Teakle must go into Webb’s house and bring it out. Were any of them to go in and get it, they realized, they risked being charged with theft. However, Teakle, once inside, showed no inclination to come out again and his brother-in-law, Webb, barred the door. Incensed, the crowd began to break down the door, smash the windows, and to unroof the cottage. Those inside defended themselves as best they could. After three hours inflicting major damage, the mob left, threatening to return the following morning. By then, however, the authorities had been alerted and order was restored, though Webb was too frightened to leave his house for some time.¹¹ ¹¹ Gloucestershire Record Office, GCL/RV.319, Uley, riots of weavers, 1792, No. 51, brief to the prosecution, Epiphany, the King against 44 persons for riot; No. 9, examination of William Webb.
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The Uley incident replicated a pattern seen throughout the region and mirrored in other textile towns. For example, at Banbury in 1793 a strike over illegal apprentices resulted in disorder when the carpet weavers discovered that one of their number ‘had betook himself to work’. A crowd of some 200 assembled, ‘paraded the streets with martial music [drums]’, and then marched out to the man’s cottage where they seized ‘his piece of shag from the loom’. Then they marched back into the town, ‘two and two, with each a piece of green bough in his hat, one of them bearing the shag mounted on an ass, preceding the rest with fifes playing.’ Defying the magistrate, they ‘laid the shag at the door of the master to whom it belonged’.¹² In Coventry the practice was termed as ‘donkeying’ but every region and trade could show such behaviour. Such ceremonies demonstrated to employers and authorities alike that the community was punishing its own and upholding customary practice, in just the same way as punishments were meted out to unfaithful husbands and others who transgressed local social customs. They became ‘riotous’ only when the authority of custom was challenged. Ceremony also characterized public ‘trials’ of materials or machines that workers believed transgressed customary norms. Tiverton weavers reacted to attempts to use imported Irish combed wool by ransacking clothiers’ wool lofts and then formally condemning and burning all the Irish wool that had been discovered.¹³ The Bradford-on-Avon woollen workers, as we have noted, held a formal trial of the first scribbling engine introduced to the town and then ceremonially burned it.¹⁴ The fact that such actions were open, that they embraced the wider working community, emphasized that these were not acts of petty vandalism but solemn processes backed by the authority of custom. Ceremony also legitimated organization. In the case of the Devon and Somerset weavers and woolcombers, their possession of ‘a common seal, tipstaffs and colours’ signified that their organizations should be regarded as equally legitimate as those of their masters. It also reflected the hostility felt towards the attempts by their employers to render their trades closed to upward mobility through incorporation, thereby undermining their ‘right’ to rise into the ranks of the clothiers. It was this insistence upon these boundaries of customary behaviour which accounts for the essential ‘orderliness’ of many riotous crowds. We should not, of course, overemphasize the ‘orderliness’ of any disturbance or tumult: once started, as Walpole pointed out, there was no way of knowing where they might lead. We have noted already the debate between historians of food riots over the relative ‘restraint’ of riotous crowds in the marketplace, with Bohstedt and Williams, among others, arguing that Thompson overemphasized the self-control of the mob.¹⁵ Rioters ¹² HO 42/26, Spillman to Dundas, 25 August 1793. ¹³ See p. 138. ¹⁴ See p. 247. ¹⁵ See, pp. 102–3. Other historians have suggested that such riots began in a relatively orderly manner but degenerated into general robbery as they progressed: for example, W. J. Shelton, English Hunger and Industrial Disorders: A Study of Social Conflict during the First Decade of George III’s Reign (Macmillan, 1973), 124–5. However, this analysis depends upon prosecution evidence that did not
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could certainly easily become very violent. And some riotous communities proved more likely to be destructive that others. Yet it remains the case that, given that the rioters were frequently entirely in possession of the field, they proved surprisingly disinclined, from this position of strength, to indulge in more general revenge, theft, or violence. However much ‘provoked’, riot was only occasionally followed by rampage. Their opponents’ property suffered attack and in many cases was severely damaged. Yet, in the main, rioters were discriminating in the extent of damage inflicted. Indeed, even the Gordon rioters were far from indiscriminate in their targets. Particularly in the case of employers, it made no sense to destroy their means of carrying on business and thereby continuing to employ labour. Physical attacks on employers were exceptional, very unlike patterns found in other eighteenth-century European countries. This is why the Luddites’ recourse to deliberate attempts at murder so shocked contemporaries. Rioters were in general careful not to include the justices in their list of victims, recognizing not only their considerable instrumental power but also the fact that their support might well be needed at some future point. In those rare cases where the property of the justices was directly targeted, the attackers often proved to be drawn from the ranks of the ‘country people’, as in turnpike disorders or the militia riots of 1757. Although this seems in some respects extraordinary— country people were, as we have noted, seen as more naturally deferential than their urban or rural manufacturing equivalents—it demonstrates that the vestigial English peasantry were far from cowed by their more powerful neighbours where their immediate economic interests were collectively threatened. Certain magistrates in Yorkshire and Lancashire came under direct and deliberate attack in 1812, but these individuals were seen by the community as having abandoned their local paternal role for that of agents of a state that was using the most severe, and indeed un-English, methods of civil control. Food rioters rarely attacked the property of the justices. One exception was the case of Justice Pryke in the Forest of Dean, but he was suspected of having taken the grain that he had seized from the rioters for his own private use.¹⁶ Magistrates were far more likely to be the recipients of appeals for help and demands for action. Such appeals, in the form of visits to the justice’s house, letters, petitions, or pressure to sign notices setting out a popular demand, were couched in terms of values that the crowd assumed were common to all decent Englishmen. Each involved the articulation of grievances and ‘stories’ that portrayed the crowd’s actions in the best light. Additionally, as the century progressed, it became increasingly common for those involved in disputes to seek to make use of the press, recognizing the growing audience and influence of public opinion. discriminate: whether food was stolen or paid for below price, it remained ‘theft’ at law and was charged as such. ¹⁶ Gloucester Journal, 23 November 1795.
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Some in authority saw in the ‘orderliness’ of the riotous crowd evidence of deliberative and disciplined leadership with military experience. Dallaway noted that the food rioters in 1766 chose men to act as sergeants and corporals: ‘They understand the use of arms.’ Magistrates in Devizes were frightened that the mob intended to visit the town not only to set the price but also to seize the militia arms stored in the castle.¹⁷ John Jones, senior, warned in 1802 that the rioters in Wiltshire ‘is not an assembly of the common Mob but a body of armed, regulated and systematic people, composed principally of militia men and marines’. His son, the factory owner, believed that the rioters had received their undoubted military training as members of the associated corps ‘who originally having purchased their muskets still retain them’. Their fears were confirmed when a notice was posted in Freshford calling upon men with arms to meet ‘and mutually agree to be commanded by officers appointed by the majority of 13 of the oldest soldiers and engineers’.¹⁸ These concerns were replicated in other regions, with some reason. Certainly the Luddite groups who smashed frames in both the East Midlands and Yorkshire in 1811–12 were managed on a quasi-military basis. However, we should not become preoccupied with the notion that riotous crowds were simply the playthings of local ex-soldiers. In the century after 1714 many men received military training, of a sort. But military training did not summon up crowds nor could it automatically provide them with direction. Riotous crowds drew upon models of behaviour from previous disorders and upon local knowledge of geography, economy, and personality. They did not in the main visit barns, workshops, or factories speculatively: they did so because they had reason to believe that they housed something that they did not like. Here the strength of community identity determined both knowledge and resolve: where trades were strong, linkages within and between communities provided a network of information far more reliable than that which the justices usually had to rely on. If the mob were often able to stay one jump ahead of the authorities, this was because they had eyes and ears everywhere. A striking feature of many rioting crowds was their mobility.¹⁹ Although nearly all riots had their origin within a ‘local’ context, they were rarely confined there, in extent or impact. The rioting crowd was prepared to travel, often prodigious distances, to impose their will. Industrial rioters often travelled well beyond their own locality, as we have seen. The militia rioters did the same, following their parish constables to the county meetings before acting. They were more than ready thereafter to march further afield to ensure that the county authorities abandoned implementation of the measure. Machine-breakers in the eighteenth ¹⁷ PC 1/8/41, Dallaway to Conway, 20 September 1766; Sutton and Garth to Shelburne, 20 September 1766. ¹⁸ HO 42/65, Jones, senior, to King, 26 July 1802; Jones to Pelham, 18 July 1802; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 7 February 1803. ¹⁹ The word seems to have been coined in the eighteenth century to describe the peregrinations of the mob.
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century came from a wide perimeter to resist the introduction of labour-saving machinery, while Luddites were notoriously willing to export their activities to neighbouring districts. The most striking examples of rioters travelling around, though, come from food rioters. Of the thousand or more ‘regulators’ who left Minchinhampton on 22 September 1766 to march to Cirencester, a dozen or so miles away, many were to continue on, as we have seen, to Ampney, Fairford, Lechlade, and eventually Abingdon, a journey of over forty miles, at every market seeking to ‘set the price’. There was no way in which those involved in this mammoth excursion could personally benefit, in the form of plunder, from so many markets being ‘regulated’: they could not have carried their gains with them. Just as with the Swing riots of 1830, rioters realized that there was little point in forcing down prices, or forcing up wages, in one locality if the neighbouring ones failed to follow suit. This would simply ensure that foodstuffs, or work, went elsewhere. Rioters had a vested interest in imposing their own pattern of ‘justice’ on the widest geography. And, as we have seen, a successful riot in one place frequently persuaded farmers, dealers, or employers elsewhere to conform to customary norms, ensuring that their impact well exceeded their immediate locality. Given the great disparity of power between rich and poor, we might reasonably expect protestors to have been more circumspect in the way in which they sought to obtain their ends. James Scott emphasizes that differential power relations naturally tend to lead the poor towards non-confrontational means of displaying dissatisfaction in the forms of whispering campaigns, petty vandalism, or threats that cannot easily be ascribed to any individual.²⁰ Such methods were certainly employed in eighteenth-century England. Yet it is the openness of the rioting crowd that strikes the historian, and indeed struck the contemporary observer. Openness was important since it demonstrated the fact that the rioters saw themselves as exercising their rights as free-born Englishmen, publicly resisting ‘illicit’ threats to their standards of living. There was only occasionally any attempt at disguise. That openness was seen most extraordinarily in the case of the footmen who rioted before their future King and their present employers in 1737 over their ‘right’ to free seats in the gods. Their sense of outrage swept aside any residual concerns that they might be stepping beyond tolerated limits. Deference was fine for everyday activity. But deference went out of the window when what were seen as fundamental rights, entitlements, or customary practices came under threat. It was a pattern replicated everywhere. Underpinning riotous assemblies was a strong sense of community. As we have seen, some communities were more likely to protest than others. Yet even here there was a cycle. The textile workers of Devonshire and south Somerset were particularly inclined to protest in the first half of the century but, with the ²⁰ J. C. Scott, ‘The Moral Economy as an Argument and as a Fight’, in A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict, and Authority (Macmillan, 2000), 187–208.
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exception of food riots, became less likely to thereafter as their industry declined and their self-confidence eroded. The same happened in the textile communities of Suffolk. In the North and Midlands, the opposite trend was the case, as the size of the industrial population generated a growing sense of unity. London always had the potential to see riots, which is why the state made such great efforts to ensure that conflicts were contained wherever possible. But, even in the most ‘riotous’ of communities men and women did not riot for fun. They did so only when they believed that this provided them with their only, or most efficacious, means of redressing intolerable threats to their well-being. All were sustained by a continuing narrative of legitimacy. Women made up half of those communities. Historians have, as we have noted, debated their role in eighteenth-century food riots. The studies of food riots in this volume, admittedly in no way a comprehensive coverage, suggest that women were frequently to the fore. Indeed, they often acted as the triggers for disorder since they seem, as the main purchasers of bread, potatoes, and other foodstuffs, to have been at the sharp end of market transactions.²¹ It is also noticeable that those altercations in which women were most prominent generally involved forcible seizure of foodstuffs rather than the more elaborate price setting. Whether that means that women were less ‘honest’ than men in terms of riot protocol is a question that can still with advantage be explored. What of the role of women in other protests? Reviewing the evidence in this study, some overall patterns suggest themselves. Women often seem to have taken a prominent part in riots concerning religious intolerance and they were far from backward in disorders associated with Jacobitism. They were also to be found, occasionally prominently, in the riots against turnpikes and in demonstrations against taxes, including the Cider Tax. They seem to have been far less likely to be involved in disorders over industrial disputes. That can, of course, be easily explained in the case of the most skilled trades, since artisans did their best to exclude women workers, at least as ‘independent’ journeymen. Yet the pattern seems to hold true, too, in the case of many outworking trades where female workers were frequently much engaged. This may have reflected the shibboleth, even among the weaker of the outworking trades, that theirs were essentially ‘craft’ occupations which, convention decreed, were male preserves. The presence of women might therefore have weakened the case that male earnings alone supported their families. Thus, if we look at riots of weavers or other outworkers in the regions, it is rare to find females in a prominent role. The same is also true for London where the activists defending the silk trade seem to have been drawn almost entirely from the ranks of the male weavers. Women also seem to have played only limited parts in political disorders. Since they were doubly excluded ²¹ On the role of women in eighteenth-century protest, see J. Bohstedt, ‘Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots, 1790–1810’, Past and Present, cxx (1988), 88–120; Thompson, Customs in Common, 305–36.
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from the vote by both lack of property and gender, this is not surprising, though, as we saw in the case of Honiton, women might be acutely conscious of the ‘blessing’ that came from the franchise in a world where votes translated directly into cash or goods. Women were much more prominent in the resistance to early machinery in the textile trades, small wonder given that it was specifically their labour being ‘saved’. They were to be found in the van against the spinning jenny wherever that was introduced across the country, demonstrating that this one innovation probably had the most damaging impact of any mechanical invention of the Industrial Revolution upon employment.²² They also played a far from insignificant role in resistance to the larger jennies in Lancashire and to the scribbling machines in the woollen industry. However, they do not seem to have been so involved in resistance to the flying shuttle, surprisingly so when one remembers that many ‘second men’ in the broad looms were in fact women, and they were not included in the resistance to cloth-dressing machinery since women were completely excluded from that trade. They were to be found on the periphery of Luddism in the East Midlands but women were often to be seen centre ground in the early attacks on steam weaving factories in Lancashire, though they were not seen in the ‘underground’ conspiracies or raids for arms that followed. Such an overview suggests that women were most likely to be found in those disorders where the sense of community was most keenly felt, but less so where specific interests were directly engaged. That is not, of course, to suggest that women were not supportive of those involved in other forms of disorder. They were in fact the backbone of protests as they were the backbone of their communities, patching up the wounded and covering up for those sought by the authorities. Their silence and support were vital in the later phases of Luddism when anti-terrorist methods were at their height. They were also the ones who had to carry on maintaining the family when male breadwinners went to gaol. Popular protest in eighteenth-century England, as we have seen, was conducted with at least one eye upon the justices. The crowd often looked for their sympathetic intervention. Indeed, the model of the moral economy demanded reciprocal magisterial action to reassert ‘proper economic functions’. It is for this reason that I have argued that riots should be read as dialogues of disorder, in which purposive statements from the crowd were answered by responses from those charged with the paternalist care of these communities. Regardless of how effective this idealized model might proved in reality, we have seen that the ²² A. J. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991), 52–62, demonstrates that the spinning jenny and slubbing billy displaced no less than 96% of women workers in the woollen industry: the work of 153 women and their 241 child assistants was taken over by the equivalent of 7 men, 6 women, and 14 children. Wherever outworkers were employed in domestic spinning, reports emphasized its catastrophic consequences for employment.
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popular intellectual conspectus of the years from 1714 to 1790 continued to hold firmly to it. How far did this change thereafter? Historians have tended to see the early 1790s as a watershed, with the French Revolution frightening the English ancien régime into repression and tighter social control. This was very much the view taken in successive works by Edward Thompson, who believed that the twin drivers of political fear and laissez-faire economics transformed the attitude of the rulers to ruling. This was seen in the way that, in his view, the food riots of 1795–1801 marked the end of the moral economy. The old consensus on the appropriateness of the model was shattered and the justices abandoned their regulatory role. ‘The breakthrough of the new political economy of the free market was also the breakdown of the old moral economy of the provision.’²³ How far does the evidence suggest that the 1790s did indeed witness such a transformation? There can be no doubt that the fears of the radical ‘threat’ posed by the development of artisan radical societies such as the London Corresponding Society greatly alarmed some in authority. Yet, in many respects, initially this ‘threat’ provoked a very old-fashioned response, as the disturbances in Birmingham in July 1791, the so-called Priestley riots, demonstrated. Dr Joseph Priestley, Unitarian, scientist, philosopher, and leading member of the Lunar Society, epitomized the worldly success that wealthy Dissenters had come to enjoy in many commercial and manufacturing towns and cities since 1714. In Birmingham, many of the wealthiest merchants and manufacturers were Dissenters. Yet, although they had established themselves as the dominant force on the manorial court leet, they had been unable to achieve wider political influence in the town since the Test and Corporations Act compelled all holders of civil office to swear fealty to the established church, something that was anathema to them. The fall of the Bastille and the widespread public euphoria that greeted a supposed new age of enlightenment encouraged the Birmingham Dissenters to agitate once more for a repeal of this remaining restriction on their liberties and also for wider parliamentary reform. Already well-used to corresponding with scientists and philosophers on the Continent in their pursuit of enlightenment and knowledge, the Birmingham reformers easily picked up the rhetoric of the early French Revolution and adapted it to their campaign for political change. However, it proved a dangerously provocative strategy. As that Revolution slowly but inevitably shifted to the left, any such apparent linkage played into the hands of their outraged enemies within the established church and the town’s Tory political oligarchy. A pamphlet war between the two sides in 1790–1 heightened tensions, with Priestley’s polemic, A Familiar Letter to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, encouraging a vitriolic response by ‘John Nott’: You never write but tell us that you’re laying [gunpowder] under the churches and mean to blow ’em up all together very soon. . . . now, prithee, Mr Priestley, how would you like it ²³ Thompson, ‘Moral Economy’, 136.
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yourself if they were to send you word that they had laid trains of gunpowder under your house or meeting house?²⁴
Satirical pamphlets and cartoons attacked the dissenting radicals as pro-French, anti-constitution, and anti-Church. One depicted ‘Dr Phlogiston, the Priestley politician or the Political Priest’, carrying pamphlets variously labelled ‘Political Sermon’, ‘Revolution Taxes’, and ‘Gunpowder’, while trampling a book entitled ‘Bible explained Away’. As events in France turned ugly, following the flight of the King, his capture at Varennes, and his humiliating return to Paris to effective imprisonment, the forces of English reaction were already in a growing ascendancy and the Anglican elite saw an opportunity to deal its enemies a mortal blow. Still flushed with the rhetoric of revolution, the liberal Dissenters announced that they would hold a dinner to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1791. A handbill, denouncing Parliament as ‘venal’, ministers as ‘hypocritical’, and the clergy as ‘legal oppressors’, appeared on the streets, purporting to be an official notice of the event. It seems probable that it was put out by the ‘Church and King’ interest and it significantly raised the political temperature.²⁵ Yet, despite warnings that it would provoke violence, the dinner took place at 3 p.m. as intended, though Priestley himself stayed away. After many toasts, it broke up at 5 p.m. Departing guests were subject to heckling while mud, stones, and a shoe were thrown at them, but there was no immediate disorder. Two Birmingham magistrates had stood by as these events unfolded. It was later claimed that the assembled crowd had asked the magistrates if they would not give them . . . leave to shake a little of the powder out of Dr Priestley’s wig, to which the said justices gave no answer but laughed heartily, and immediately took their hats off and waved them three times around their heads, and the said justices and people so assembled all cried ‘Huzza’ three times.²⁶
Whether this was a signal for violence, it was not long coming. Three hours later, a far larger mob had gathered, smashed all the windows in the hotel where the dinner had been held and then marched to New Meeting House, where Priestley presided. They forced their way in, emptied the chapel of its contents, and set it alight. Next, the Old Meeting House shared the same fate. When the fire engines arrived, the mob would only allow them to protect the neighbouring houses: the chapel was left to burn to the ground. Finally the mob marched to Priestley’s residence, where they destroyed his library and laboratory before burning the house down.²⁷ ²⁴ ‘John Nott’, Very Familiar Letters to Dr Priestley in answer to his ‘Familiar Letter to the Inhabitants of Birmingham’ (Birminham, 1791), Letter II, p. 13. ²⁵ HO 42/19, An Authentic Account of the Riots (Birmingham, 1791), 5. ²⁶ Ibid., ‘Russell Depositions’, deposition of Joseph Camden, July 1791. ²⁷ These disturbances are covered in R. B. Rose, ‘The Priestley riots of 1791’, Past and Present, xviii (1960), 68–88. Rose’s interpretation of the riots as disorders that got out of hand has been challenged by M. Smith, Conflict and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century Birmingham (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1977), 1–56. Smith argues that the magistrates were instrumental in the development of the disorders.
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Disorder spread and continued for a further two days. More Dissenter chapels and private houses were attacked and destroyed. It was said that every door in the town was chalked with ‘Church and King’. It was only when the rioters began to spread their targetry from the leading Dissenters to other wealthy persons and forced open the town prisons and freed the prisoners that the authorities chose to act with any decision. Until this point, the magistrates had effectively encouraged the rioters. At the attack upon the house of John Ryland, a merchant and banker, it was alleged that Justice Carles had arrived in a chaise, took off his hat and waved it out of the window and cried ‘Church and King for ever my lads, be true to your cause, stick to your cause, be of my determination to lose the last drop of blood in your body . . . don’t leave the Presbyterian dogs a place standing’²⁸
The methods employed by the rioters, and the trail of destruction that they left in their wake, directly echoed the attacks on Dissenting meeting houses in the region in 1715, which had led Parliament to rush through the Riot Act, and the attacks on Catholic chapels in London and Bath in 1780. As in earlier riots, the ‘Church and King’ mob remained a highly destructive force: in total, four meeting houses were destroyed and some twenty-seven houses ransacked, with many being burned to the ground. And, as previously, the crowd took its lead from an Anglican elite that felt itself threatened by the wealth and influence of the Dissenters. Nonetheless, the mob was not ‘hired’ in the conventional sense. The riots showed that the cry of the ‘Church in danger’ remained surprisingly potent and still roused the crowd since support for the Church demonstrated their continuing support for English liberties. An amalgam of bogeymen justified resistance to the Dissenters. An account sent to the Times noted that the mob ‘continually shouted’ ‘God Save the King’—‘Long live the King, and the Constitution in Church and State’— ‘Down with the dissenters—down with the abetters of French rebellion’—‘Church and King’—‘Down with the Rumps’—‘No Olivers’—‘No false Rights of Man’.
These slogans indicate a curious dualism of old and new which, for a period, informed the attitudes of the Birmingham mob. The correspondent, clearly an apologist for the establishment, emphasized that it was ‘the loyal spirit of the numerous inhabitants’ that had ‘manifested itself against those factious traitors’ whose ‘treasonable’ attitudes threatened ‘overturning the Constitution of the Empire’. Clearly, however fanciful, radicals could be presented as threats to the rights of the free-born Englishman.²⁹ Ironically, that residual trigger, ‘Popery’, seems to have informed at least some rioters. Several accounts referred to the mob declaiming ‘No Papists’. William Hutton, a victim of the disorders, noted, ‘The stupid dunces vociferated “No popery! Down with the Pope!” forgetting that ²⁸ HO 42/19, ‘Russell Depositions’, deposition of James Johnson, July 1791. ²⁹ The Times, 18 July 1791.
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Presbyterians were never remarkable for favouring the religion of that potentate.’³⁰ Priestley himself described the riots as ‘the mad triumph of bigotry’. That bigotry was not, as we have seen, new. However, whereas the state had proved ferocious in its pursuit of those responsible for earlier disturbances, in 1791 Pitt’s Tory government showed nothing but partiality towards the Tory bench and clergy. Token demands were made that the local authorities should seek out the malefactors, but they fell on deaf ears, since, given the clear complicity of the local elite, such enquiries could have only led to political embarrassment. William Russell, a friend of Priestley and leading figure in the Lunar Society who had seen his house destroyed by the mob, was compelled to assemble his own evidence in a series of depositions from witnesses. His attempt to ensure that the deputy under-sheriff ’s complicity in the riots was taken into account when the jury for the Warwick assizes was assembled failed. The jury was packed with members hostile to the Dissenters.³¹ Just seventeen men were tried for their alleged parts in the riots. Only four were convicted, with two being hanged. Both were ‘labourers’. All were said to have been victims of ‘the phrenzy of delusion’.³² George III believed that Priestley had been hoist with his own petard in demanding wider enfranchisement: he had suffered ‘for the doctrines which he and his party have instilled’.³³ The Priestley riots proved to be an overture to a ferocious ‘loyalist’ anti-radical backlash, which, within a year, was to grow to national proportions. ‘Church and King’ mobs across the country burned effigies of Thomas Paine and harassed radicals, strongly supported by the Pitt government and the local magistracy. Here we see once more the ‘provoked’ mob, stimulated into action by members of the respectable classes, as in the case of Gordon, for their own ends, but responding independently to presumed threats to their own rights and liberties. Nor did the Priestley riots mark the end to attacks on religious opponents of the established church. In 1794, Baptists attending a meeting in Woodstock were attacked by a large mob of local people and troops who were stationed in the little town and chased away. Protests to the Home Office were airily waved aside. Collusion between the local authorities and rector were strongly suspected.³⁴ However, in general, this use of the mob to defend the ancien régime ebbed as fast as it flowed. In a context of rapidly rising living costs and rampant inflation, loyalists could not keep control of the streets for long. As we noted earlier, radicals were to find that the price of bread proved an effective recruiting sergeant and after the summer of ³⁰ L. Jewitt, (ed.), The Life of William Hutton and the history of the Hutton Family (London, 1873), 241. ³¹ HO 42/19, Russell to Chamberlayne, 31 July 1791; Jewitt, Life of William Hutton, 245. ³² The Times, 25 August 1791. ³³ B. Dobree, The Letters of King George III (Cassell, 1935), 212. ³⁴ D. Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700–1870 (Macmillan, 1997), 33.
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1795 ‘Peace and Bread’ proved a more powerful slogan.³⁵ A Birmingham radical noted in 1795 that the justices ‘gave us plenty of Ale & spirits to urge us on . . . when we were rioting for “Church and King” ’ but ‘Now we are rioting for a big Loaf we must be shot & cut up like Bacon Pigs’.³⁶ The old ‘Church and King’ injunction lost its appeal when it became clear that neither Church nor King had any interest in the rocketing price of bread or the economic disruption of the war. This apparent popular volte-face would not have surprised Priestley. In his own account of the riots, published in 1792, he predicted that the ‘lawless rabble’ might easily be led in a contrary direction: ‘Nothing is wanted but an artful leader.’³⁷ Other disorders in the 1790s likewise carried more than echoes of earlier riots. For example, the government’s attempt to treble the size of the militia by establishing a ‘supplementary’ force led to riots in 1796 that directly echoed those of 1757. Again, fears that government intended to send these men overseas fuelled alarm, but the main resistance came, as earlier, from the rural areas and their strong sense of injustice that yet more men were to be drafted into the service of the state with little compensation. Worst hit were the agrarian counties of eastern England. In Lincolnshire disturbances broke out when the justices attempted to ballot for the force. This region suffered from an acute labour scarcity and here the system of balloting had not taken place for many years. At Lincoln and Gainsborough magistrates prudently absented themselves from meetings, but at Caistor a large crowd seized the lists and destroyed them. The decision to hold a meeting at Horncastle on 5 November, a notoriously unruly day in any case, proved doubly unfortunate. Men set up barriers around the town and stopped all parish constables who passed, forcing them to hand over their lists. Anyone refusing was held up by his ears until he relented. Passers-by and inhabitants were pressed for monetary contributions, much of which was spent on drink. Only the timely intervention of the yeomanry at Boston ensured the ballot took place here. In Norfolk, a large and angry crowd at Norwich disrupted the county meeting, refusing to permit the deputies to enter the courthouse until they promised to make the proceedings public. At Northampton the authorities managed to quieten fears, but in Wellingborough it needed the yeomanry to restore order. In Gloucestershire, an angry crowd disrupted the subdivision meeting held at Stowe on the Wold and seized the constables’ lists, just as a crowd had done in 1757, and the process was halted.³⁸ ³⁵ The slogan is taken from a placard in J. Gilray, ‘The Republican Attack’ (H. Humphrey, 1 November 1795). The cartoon of the ‘Pop-Gun Plot’ shows the Whigs leading the mob. Pitt, the coachman, whips the horses on, in the process trampling a female figure whose shield and broken spear might indicate Britannia. ³⁶ Birmingham reformers to the London Corresponding Society, 10 July 1795, cited in R. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1803 (Alan Sutton, 1988), 136. ³⁷ J. Priestley, An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham (Birmingham, 1792), 88. ³⁸ The Times, 18 November, 1796; J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 1965), 294–5; J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales,
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Country people also continued to protest when their common rights were threatened by enclosure, as Jeanette Neeson has shown. Although the process was heavily stacked against them, there were various ways in which they might hinder change and thereby increase petitioners’ costs.³⁹ Sometimes hostility took more physical forms. In 1758 in the Wiltshire village of Shaw, ‘a large mob of weavers, labourers and other disorderly persons’ destroyed ‘the banks and fences of the gardens and orchards in that neighbourhood, under pretence that they were purloined from the common’ while at North Leigh Heath, near Witney, in 1761 a mob armed with bludgeons and pitchforks broke down the newly erected fences. They maintained their attack for two days against soldiers until they were finally driven off.⁴⁰ A study of crime in Somerset in the Hanoverian period shows that, of 359 prosecutions for riot between 1723 and 1820, some 29 were for pulling down fences, hedges, or gates of the plaintiff, the majority of these cases coming from the south-eastern hundreds of the county where parliamentary enclosure was most concentrated in the years from 1760 to 1814.⁴¹ With the increasing pace of enclosure in the years after 1793, more disorders followed. In neighbouring Wiltshire, the attempt to implement enclosure at Mere resulted in rioting and the destruction of the fences. Here continued local opposition delayed the final award for fourteen years.⁴² Neeson notes that, following the disputed passage of the enclosure bill for Raunds in 1797, rioters led by the village women and some shoemakers pulled down the new fences and gates and made huge bonfires, celebrating their success long into the night. And at Wilbarston, where ‘The Major Part of the ffarmers, ffreeholders and Cottagers’ had protested, unsuccessfully, against a bill to enclose since it would undermine their economic viability, some 300 commoners assembled and for two days in 1799 prevented the erection of fences until they were forcibly driven off by yeomanry.⁴³ Attacks on other rights, too, were resisted. King has shown how the attempts of many farmers, post-enclosure, to curtail the ‘right’ of the poor to glean after the harvest generated protest. In 1799 a farmer in Easthorpe challenged a woman he found in his fields after the harvest and ‘desired her not to glean any longer’. She replied ‘that it was not his property but belonged to her.’ The next day the same woman was there again, supported by thirty others. Such low-key confrontations were far from infrequent in the region. Not all ended peacefully. In 1788 at Aldham in Suffolk ‘A great number of people amounting to a hundred or thereabouts’ assembled ‘in tumultuous 1790–1810 (Harvard University Press, 1983), 179–8; Bath Journal, 12 December 1796; HO 42/39, Berkeley to Portland, 12 December 1796. ³⁹ J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993), 262–90. ⁴⁰ Gentleman’s Magazine, xxviii (1758), 286; London Chronicle, 28 March 1761. ⁴¹ S. Pole, Crime, Society and Law Enforcement in Hanoverian Somerset (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1983), 190. The statistics are calculated from ASSI 24/39–44 and SRO Q/Si 1723–1820. ⁴² Victoria History of the Counties of England: Wiltshire (Oxford, 1959) iv. 68. ⁴³ Neeson, Commoners, 278–9, 268; Annual Register (1799), 27
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manner insisted on gleaning wheat’. When the farmer tried to evict them, two women assaulted him.⁴⁴ Prisoners, too, continued to assert their rights, just as the debtors who had rioted in the Fleet in 1731 had done. For example, in June 1791: The prisoners in the King’s Bench, being disgusted with a paper stuck up on the chapel door on Monday afternoon, intimating that the debtors would receive no relief this sessions of parliament through Mr Grey’s bill, began to murmur, and vociferate LIBERTY!
The measure would threaten every man’s chances of being liberated in the customary, if random, way, but the inmates were particularly angry on behalf of one man who had been confined for the previous eight months ‘for having attempted to escape’. They chose a spokesman to parley with the prison authorities but he in turn was locked up in solitary confinement. ‘This circumstance added to their discontent and they became more clamorous.’ The prison marshal, alarmed, armed the warders and marched out to challenge the prisoners who had assembled between the two outer walls of the prison. Facing the angry prisoners, the guards fired, wounding one man in the wrist, and then retreated. ‘This so incensed the prisoners that they threw a number of brickbats over the wall and obliged them to retire to the top of the keeper’s house, where they could see what was doing without risking their personal safety.’ Only when horse guards were brought in, swords drawn, was order restored.⁴⁵ The food riots of 1795, as we have seen, likewise demonstrated no immediate break from past models of action or magisterial counter-action. Even the riots of 1800–1 had much in common with their predecessors, with both gentlemen and justices continuing to demonstrate their commitment to the old paternal model. However, if we cast forward to 1811–12, it is clear that something had changed. As has been noted, these years saw very rapid increases in food prices. Indeed, in 1812 the price of wheat far exceeded any peak reached in the years between 1794 and 1801.⁴⁶ For the distressed poor, the failure of the 1811 potato crop was even more disastrous. Yet the country experienced remarkably little in the way of food riots. Certainly there were some. Tin miners in Cornwall invaded Truro market in March, seeking out stocks of grain in the way in which their forebears had done throughout the previous century. They also ransacked a Redruth brewery for malting barley. There were isolated outbreaks of food rioting at Plymouth, Barnstaple, and Bristol, but, in the main, the old food rioting centres in the South-west stayed remarkably calm. The odd disorder took place in the West Midlands but the main location for food riots proved to be in the cotton and woollen regions already disturbed by Luddism. Serious food riots took place at Sheffield and at Macclesfield at a time when machine-breaking was at its height but most riots took place only when machine-breaking gave way to other forms of ⁴⁴ P. King, ‘Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions in England 1750–1850’, Past and Present, cxxv (1989), 120. ⁴⁵ The Times, 1 June 1791. ⁴⁶ J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (Batsford, 1966), 113.
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disorder. The same pattern could be observed in the East Midlands where food riots, generally of a relatively minor character, followed the failure of the knitters’ petition. Yet the country as a whole remained remarkably quiet even though faced yet again with the threat of famine.⁴⁷ Indeed, food markets in 1812 remind one of the ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’, investigated by Sherlock Holmes. The lack of barking requires some explanation. Did the absence of riots indicate the triumph of the ideology of the free market? Had the lessons of ‘Dr Smith’s Disciples’ now been so deeply imbued that the consumer, chastened by the experience of 1800–1, at last recognized the futility of seeking to regulate markets? A deal more research on these years is needed if we are fully to understand what made them so different. One signifier that some sort of sea change was taking place can be seen in the long-contested area of market weights and measures. We have noted earlier the continuing failure of the authorities to enforce the use of the Winchester measures. Even in the 1790s, as has been noted, the customary measures continued to hold sway in many places. However, it is noticeable that this transition was finally achieved, apparently without conflict, in 1812 and the years shortly after. Thus, the Nottingham Journal reported in November 1812, in the wake of Luddism and then food rioting, that ‘a numerous meeting of gentlemen farmers, maltsters, and dealers in corn’ had resolved the measure to be used thenceforward ‘shall be strictly conformable to the legal Winchester standard’.⁴⁸ They were not alone. Meetings of farmers and dealers in Berkshire and Gloucestershire in April 1812 considered ‘the propriety of introducing the legal or Winchester measure in place of that now used’, while in north Devon a determined attempt was made to do the same.⁴⁹ Again, research into the operation of the corn market in that disastrous year would help us to understand what had changed in local and regional attitudes. Clearly one thing that had changed by 1800 was the capacity of the state to project its power internally. At the accession of George I, the Hanoverian state had struggled to assert its might. This was, of course, the deliberate intention of a constitutional settlement that protected the autonomy of the great magnates and the county authorities, the result of the deep-rooted historical fears of a standing army and of a monarchy with centralizing ambitions. That unwillingness to augment the power of the state, as we have seen throughout this study, undermined its capacity to maintain order. In 1745 it might well have cost the Hanoverians the throne, had the Pretender received even the most limited support as his army marched south. And, even when the bitter hostility between Whigs and Tories weakened into political compromise in the years after 1750, exemplified in the way in which that emblem of Hanoverian crowd control, the ⁴⁷ A. Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of An Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900 (Croom Helm, 1983), 103–6. ⁴⁸ Nottingham Journal, 23 November 1811. ⁴⁹ Gloucester Journal, 30 March 1812; see p. 73 See also A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth, Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, 1996), 42–3.
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Riot Act, ceased to attract condemnation, the executive power of the state was not easily augmented. Compromises continued to be reached, sometimes, as in the case of the Militia Act of 1757, with disastrous consequences. A willingness to tolerate some degree of popular disorder was considered a price worth paying by the landed elite if the alternative was a state that, through an augmented domestic army or police, might seek to interfere in matters best left to local discretion. The French Revolution and the war that broke out against revolutionary France in 1793 are usually seen as the key factors persuading the English ruling class that the country’s military strength needed to be significantly boosted. However, it was only the threat of invasion from 1797 onwards that finally shattered the old attitude towards a large army. Thereafter the state itself enlisted troops wholesale from across the country. But the numbers of men under arms was also boosted by volunteer detachments of all descriptions. Thus, alongside regular regiments and enlarged militia were to be found yeomanry, formed at both a county and a local level, volunteer fencible cavalry, loyalist associations, volunteer corps, volunteer infantry, and many other descriptions of citizens’ armies. Almost none of these volunteer regiments existed before 1795, few before 1797. The threat of Napoleon’s invasion had galvanized a most un-military people as nothing before it. By 1800 the presence of the military, in numbers and across a geography that in an earlier period would have seemed extraordinary, had come to seem so commonplace that the soldiery regularly filled the assembly rooms, and the pages of novels, as if part of the furniture. By 1803, Linda Colley estimates, some 500,000 civilians ‘were drawn into civil defence and given arms by the state’. This was, as she notes, a calculated risk. As we have seen, there were still residual fears of arming the poor. Yet by the end of the 1790s, supported by the press, the ministry had transformed the way in which the respectable classes viewed the question of public order and served to ensure that society as a whole had come to see the army as a boon and not as a curse. Pitt himself noted in 1803 that ‘There was a time . . . when it would have been dangerous to entrust arms with a great proportion of the people of this country . . . But that time is now past.’⁵⁰ A shared vision of a ‘protesting people’ had been transformed into one of patriotic citizens. The old consensus on the rights of the free-born Englishman to protest had been seriously eroded. The mood had become more sober, severe, and intolerant. It is, for example, impossible to imagine Pitt, or any of his successors, declaring, as Newcastle had done, his previous enjoyment in leading a mob or reminding the political class that that the state owed its existence to a mob. The Luddites, as we have noted, were to experience that changed world from the sharp end. The repudiation by the state of any sort of regulatory role followed. We have noted that the Cotton Arbitration Acts marked the last gasp of moral economic ⁵⁰ Cited in L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1737 (Yale University Press, 1992), 309–10. Her chapter dealing with ‘Manpower’, 283–319, marks the most thoughtful and interesting examination of the transformation of attitudes towards the military.
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intervention. Thereafter, the cold wind of laissez-faire blew through the land, experienced first by the workers and master clothiers in the woollen trade and then in the Frame Breakers’ Act of 1812 and in the response given to the framework knitters’ petition. A year later the wage-fixing clauses of the 1563 Act were abolished and in 1814, despite an impressive campaign by the trades, the old general apprenticeship clauses were swept away.⁵¹ In recent British history, only the impact of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1980s upon a society’s way of thinking about itself can compare with the transformational role of the state in these years. Although popular protest certainly did not die out after 1814, it had mainly become a monologue. The dialogue of disorder had broken down in almost all of the venues where riotous assemblies had occurred in the preceding one hundred years. That is not to argue that the ideas of the moral economy perished in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. A residual memory of the old social moral order survived in many communities and some continued to maintain a vestigial presence. In rural England it was to burst forth in two exceptional bouts of disorder: the revolt of the field in East Anglia in 1816 and in the more extensive Swing riots of 1830.⁵² In Gloucestershire, weavers retained the old moral economic model as late as 1838 while radicals such as Cobbett and Richard Oastler echoed the old values.⁵³ However, in most industrial and manufacturing communities new forms of economic and micropolitical interactions had to be constructed. I noted at the start of this volume that we must see riots as the final and not the first line of defence of popular customs and rights. Communities well knew that protesting often brought pain, imprisonment, and death. But what do we know about the individual men and women who took part? Historians, even those historians of popular protest, have done little to ‘redeem’ the reputation of the individual rioter. Rudé argued, on the basis of the evidence which emerged at the trials of those rioters captured and tried for the Gordon riots in 1780, that they were not the dregs of society nor ne’er do wells but came from a cross section of working people. But, in general, little effort has been spent in ⁵¹ The best description of the campaign is in I. Protheroe, Artisans and Politics in Early NineteenthCentury London (Methuen, 1979), 51–61. ⁵² Roger Wells has argued persuasively for seeing the values of moral economy continuing into the century and informing Swing more widely, whereas other local studies, such as that by Carl Griffin’s work on Kent, reveals a similar complexity and ambiguity of crowd action and gentry response that would not look out of place in the eighteenth century. A study of the Swing riots in Wiltshire in 1830 likewise suggests that the paternalist model was far from dead there three decades into the new century. R. Wells, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Countryside’, in Randall and Charlesworth (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest, 209–71; C. Griffin, ‘ “Policy on the Hoof ”; Sir Robert Peel, Sir Edward Knatchbull and the Trial of the Elham Machine Breakers, 1830’, Rural History, xv (2) (2004), 127–48; A. J. Randall and E. Newman, ‘Protest, Proletarians and Paternalists: Social Conflict in Rural Wiltshire, 1830–1850’, Rural History, vi (2) (1995), 205–27. ⁵³ A. J. Randall and A. Charlesworth, ‘The Moral Economy: Riots, Markets and Social Conflict’, in eid. (eds.), Moral Economy and Popular Protest, 23–4.
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examining the motivations of those individuals who, for one reason or another, placed their lives at risk in taking part in popular protests. Of course, finding evidence of their lives and views is like seeking needles in haystacks. However, we do know about some of them, namely those who paid the ultimate price for their actions and were hanged. Such people attracted more attention in the press than did other ‘lesser’ rioters and in consequence have sometimes left a rather fuller record. Such evidence, of course, is not without its problems. Confessions were ‘expected’ of the condemned and, printed, were often hawked around by pedlars at or after the hanging. Many were, no doubt, invented or glossed to entertain such an audience. However, whereas the dubious careers of highwaymen and murders might well be elaborated, the stories of those involved in popular protests lent themselves less easily to fictionalizing, given that many in the audience might themselves have taken part. Although we should resist seeing such people as villains, or heroes, of a morality play, they were, from either bravery or stupidity, prepared to act. What brought them to the gallows? We have already noted the case of John Beazer, the weaver caught up in ‘the hurricane’ of popular protest at Melksham in November 1737. According to the lengthy account of his confession in the Gloucester Journal, published after his execution, he had been born of poor parents who, he claimed, went without so that he could acquire a ‘good learning’. Apprenticed to a master weaver at 14, he had served his time and married ‘an honest woman’ and raised a son. Through dint of ‘honest labour and endeavours’ he had acquired two looms, a couple of apprentices, and ‘lived in good credit, and had the love and esteem of all men’. He had also been an active churchgoer. This gratifying tale of self-help was shattered when Beazer succumbed to ‘the great sin of drunkenness’. His fall from respectability to pauper followed in short suit. He had been forced back into the ranks of journeymen, thrown upon the mercy of the parish and his standing in the community lost. His ‘confession’ therefore suited the sort of moral cautionary tale that the Journal ’s paternalist editor, Robert Raikes, liked to print. Yet, whatever the standing of this as a human tragedy, we should note that Beazer ill-fitted the role model of the hardened rioter. Swept up in the hurricane, he admitted that he took his opportunity to exact revenge upon a clothier whose wage cuts were threatening the livelihoods of every weaver in the district. But he was scarcely a ‘leader’. And it is hard not to reflect that he was as much a victim as was Coulthurst.⁵⁴ We know less about the turnpike rioters executed for their parts in the smashing of tollgates. This may reflect the fact that the turnpike protestors had very considerable popular support, a fact attested to by the need to remove many of their trials from the counties in which their crimes had taken place. Elaborate news of their judicial murder might have merely served to inflame local opinion. ⁵⁴ Gloucester Journal, 10 April 1739.
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We can, therefore, in the main only speculate about the reasons that brought them to the gallows. Let us, for example, ask about the ‘story’ of Thomas Reynolds, the turnpike rioter whose arrest following the attack on the gates at Ledbury in September 1734 led to his being charged under the Black Act for being in disguise and then sent off to be tried at the King’s Bench and then hanged at Tyburn. Reynolds had, with others, assembled, ‘armed with Axes, Hatchets, and other Instruments, with an Intent to cut down and destroy a certain Turnpike’. A local magistrate, Justice Skipp, arrived with a party of gentlemen and servants and a fierce altercation took place, during which Reynolds and James Bayliss, both dressed in woman’s clothes, were arrested and taken back to the justice’s house to be interrogated. However, Reynold’s group proved to be but part of a much larger mob that had assembled. This larger group easily completed the destruction of all the gates around the town. Hearing of the imprisonment of their colleagues, they marched to Skipp’s house, clearly intent upon securing the men’s release. Prominent in egging on the attackers was a woman, Elizabeth Walters, a spinster. She was later charged that she ‘did then and there advise, persuade, and encourage the said other Persons . . . to discharge and shoot off several guns to and against the said dwelling house of the said John Skipp, with an intent forcibly to rescue the said James Bayliss and Thomas Reynolds’. One may only speculate as to why Elizabeth was so concerned about the fate of the two men, though it may not be too fanciful to suggest a romantic link with Reynolds. Bayliss was a married man and was wearing his wife’s clothes. Perhaps Reynolds was dressed in Elizabeth’s second-best frock?⁵⁵ Reynolds was an agricultural labourer. This immediately raises the question as to why a labourer should be taking part in the attack on turnpikes? Unlike the farmers for whom he worked, he had no stock to drive to market, no cart to drive to and fro upon the newly privatized road, no fear of prices falling as a result of a widening of the market. Nor is it conceivable that he was there because his employers, the farmers, coerced him and his fellows to dress up in women’s frocks and take part. There was, in short, no good ‘economic’ reason why he should have gone out that day other than a belief that the local community, his community, was being attacked by unreasonable and overpowerful enemies who were taking a public highway and making it their personal fiefdom. Such actions offended the notions of the free-born Englishman every bit as much in the villages as in the towns. However, unlike the more prosperous Somerset farmers who were arrested for similar actions in Bristol, Reynolds, hauled off to London as an example, did not have access to influential patrons who might just have found the right form of words or necessary sureties to secure his release, his pardon, or, at the least, then commutation of the death sentence. His colleague, Bayliss, impeached his fellow ⁵⁵ TS 11/1122/X/104426, ‘A Narrative of the Riot That Happened at Ledbury in the County of Hereford on the 20th Day of Sept. 1735 When the Turnpikes Were Cut Down’; 1122/5824, ‘Copy of Several Informations of Persons Concerned n the Riot at Ledbury’; W. Stubbs and G. Talmash, The Crown Circuit Companion (London, 1749), ii. 388–9.
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rioters and proved generally cooperative with the authorities and so, despite being found guilty, was reprieved. Reynolds kept his counsel and ended up on Tyburn tree. Like Beazer, he could hardly be called a ‘ringleader’ or a hardened criminal. We can find other tantalizing snippets of the stories of those men who were hanged for their parts in the food riots of 1766. In Gloucestershire, Stephen Cratchley was hanged for blowing the horn before the attack upon Thomas Chandler’s shop in Paganhill. At the gallows, he noted that ‘he little thought his crime had been of so heinous a nature’, though he also ‘hoped his countrymen would let the untimely fate of him and his companions have due influence on their minds.’ He might at least be seen as a ‘ringleader’, something that could not be said of one of his fellow condemned, Anselm Prinn, who, though ‘a very ignorant lad, behaved with great decency’. James Kittlety, the Bradford-on-Avon weaver, who had led rioters there, ‘would make no confession’.⁵⁶ We know a little more of Daniel Ecland, who was executed on 6 January 1767 at Reading for his part in the riots in the Thames Valley. At his trial Ecland was accused of being a leading figure in a crowd of food rioters who had assembled in Abingdon on 26 September 1766 and then marched to the neighbouring village of Drayton. There they forced their way into a house owned by William Bedford and forced him to sell his stocks of flour at 5s. a bushel. They then ransacked the barn of John Lyford, the local constable, searching for his rumoured large stocks of grain. While engaged in their search, they were surprised by Lyford who had arrived hot foot on hearing of the rioters’ presence. Ecland told Lyford that the mob were ‘regulators’ and insisted that they would take his wheat at 5s. a bushel. At first Lyford denied all knowledge of any grain stocks, but, threatened with the arson of his house, he eventually told the ‘regulators’ where it was hidden. There was so much that it had to be piled onto a wagon to be hauled back to Abingdon. The rioters then forced their way into the houses of other farmers and dealers, seizing food and extorting drink.⁵⁷ At the Special Commission at Reading in December 1766, Ecland was found guilty and sentenced to death. The account of his death was recorded in the press and gives us an insight into the personal horrors of such events: It was a most affecting scene: Ecland’s wife, with his six poor children, attending to take their last farewell, under these deplorable circumstances, and to bring away the body after execution, with which they next day arrived at Abingdon, having rode in the same cart all the way. The spectators at this execution appeared greatly affected, as it seems Ecland had always sustained an unblemished character before he unhappily joined in the late outrage.⁵⁸
Again we may draw the lesson that those who ‘led’ riots cannot easily be painted into an easy category of social misfit or serial disturber of the peace. Ecland, the ⁵⁶ Gloucester Journal, 5, 12 January 1767; Bath Chronicle, 15 January 1767. ⁵⁷ Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 27 September 1766; TS 11/995, testimonies of John Bruce, John Lyford; case against Ecland et al. ⁵⁸ Gloucester Journal, 12 January 1767.
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family man, had taken to the role of regulator with some gusto but from a past which, apparently, had offered few hints that he would end his days dangling from rope in the full public gaze of his friends, his wife, and his children. One can but wonder what effect such a scene had on their young minds. Let me conclude with one final story about a protestor, the story of a young man who, in several ways, lies behind my writing this book, namely Thomas Helliker, the young shearman’s colt or apprentice who was hanged in 1803 for his role in the destruction of the isolated woollen mill at Littleton in Wiltshire. Thomas Helliker (or Hilliker or Elliker, the spelling of his name varies across documents and across time) was born in 1783, the second youngest of eight sons of Thomas and Elizabeth Hilliker.⁵⁹ His elder brothers, John, Robert, and Joseph, were all apprenticed as shearmen and his younger brother James, like Thomas, followed in their footsteps. Thomas began his apprenticeship in 1797, working in all probability for Francis Naish in his workshops in the Conigre, already a slum corner of the main Wiltshire cloth-making town of Trowbridge. It was not, on reflection, a propitious time to enter the trade, since the troubles over the introduction of the gig mill were already beginning to assume a serious dimension. Nonetheless, the trade of shearman had always guaranteed its possessor both a good lifestyle and respect within the working community. Shearmen earned good money: croppers in 1812 were said to be able to spend ‘twice or three times as much money at the ale house than the weaver or dyer’⁶⁰ and their West Country colleagues enjoyed similar incomes. Moreover, shearmen were ranked among the elite crafts in their localities. A correspondent to the Leeds Mercury in 1803 said of the Yorkshire croppers: a cropper strictly speaking is not a servant. He does not feel or call himself as such, but a cloth worker, and partakes much more of the nature of a shoemaker, joiner, taylor, etc . . . Like them, he comes and goes, stops a longer or shorter time . . . according as he may chance to work.⁶¹
There was little indication in 1797 that those who were responsible for finishing the finest woollen cloth produced in the country would themselves be finished before he became forty years old. Helliker’s older brothers were certainly members of the local shearmen’s combination. In 1797, the year Thomas was first apprenticed, they would have joined the new Brief Institution, the organization that united cloth dressers across the country in one union. They would have been issued with their new membership cards, depicting crossed shears over the motto, ‘May industry & freedom unite us in friendship’.⁶² Thomas’ eldest brother, John Helliker, was a member of the ⁵⁹ The preponderant spelling of the surname in surviving documents makes it clear that Hilleker was the preferred spelling but posterity has decreed that Helliker is how Thomas is remembered. I am grateful to Susan Hilliker for information on the family. ⁶⁰ Manchester Exchange Herald, 21 April 1812. ⁶¹ Leeds Mercury, 15 January 1803. ⁶² A plate showing the card issued in Trowbridge can be see in Randall, Before the Luddites, 135.
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Trowbridge shearmen’s committee. He was arrested in August 1802 a week after his young brother had been arrested and charged by James Read, on the evidence of the renegade Thomas Bailey, with ‘aiding and assisting at, and present at, and consenting to, the administering or taking an oath or encouragement, by James May of Trowbridge, clothworker, to the said Thomas Bailey’.⁶³ Like his sibling, John spent the following months in prison, though he was kept in the Devizes Bridewell, not in Salisbury gaol where Thomas was confined. Bailey, his accuser, was also kept in prison, in Marlborough Bridewell, ‘for the protection of his person as that may be forthcoming when wanted’.⁶⁴ As noted, this did not prove effective. By the time the assizes arrived, Bailey’s memory had failed him and the committee were all acquitted. Their trial followed that of Thomas Helliker. We can only wonder at the feelings of John, freed but knowing that his younger sibling was sentenced to hang. His distress may have been increased by the fact that he knew his brother had an alibi, provided by Thomas’ friend and fellow apprentice, Joseph Warren. Like Thomas, he worked for Naish at the Conigre. Warren claimed that, on the night on which the mill at Littleton was attacked, the two had been out on the town drinking. Helliker, he claimed, had been so drunk that he was unable to get home and so Warren had helped him into the kitchen of the house belonging to John Walter, or Waller, where Warren was staying. Warren had a ‘sweetheart’, Ann Waller, so this was presumably the reason for his stay. Warren claimed to have locked Helliker in the kitchen, putting the key in a place of which Helliker, lost in a drunken stupor, could not have known. Only when morning came and Walter rose to unlock the house could Thomas have got out.⁶⁵ It was not much of an alibi but, as long as Warren and Walter were prepared to swear in court that it was true, it might well secure Thomas’s acquittal. Within days of Thomas Helliker’s arrest on 3 August, Warren made his statement to the local magistrates. As soon as he heard of this, his employer, Francis Naish, immediately ‘interviewed’ the boy. He had reason to be worried. His millman, Ralph Heath, had positively identified Helliker. Now that one positive connection stood in jeopardy. Before he could investigate further, Warren disappeared, spirited away by the shearmen to Yorkshire. They realized that once James Read, the Bow Street magistrate, learned of this new evidence, he would arrest Warren and grill him, as he did other suspects. The flight north does not suggest that the shearmen were confident that Warren’s alibi would stand. We do not know what his evidence might have achieved because Warren never turned up for Thomas Helliker’s trial. We do, however, know that it was expected by all that he would. His sweetheart, Ann Waller, wrote to him, ‘I know that you cannot come to me unless you do mean to involve yourself in trouble and put it ⁶³ KB 1/31/Pt 2, The King v James May, Philip Edwards and others; HO 42/66, Read to King, 3 October 1802; HO 95/5, King to White, 1 January 1803. ⁶⁴ HO 42/66, Read to Pelham, 13 August 1803. ⁶⁵ KB 1/31/Pt 2, draft deposition of Joseph Warren, n.d.
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out your power to do anything for your friend.’ She urged him to be careful with his money, ‘for you will not be sure to have work till the time you must come home which will not be till March next.’ The assizes were set of March 1803. Warren’s uncle was William May, another member of the shearmen’s committee and the brother of James May, the secretary. He was a trusted figure in the union and served as an envoy from the Wiltshire men to Yorkshire in December 1802 when the respective costs of employing a counsel for the forthcoming parliamentary enquiry into the industry were agreed. William wrote to Joseph Warren: ‘you must not come here by no means. There was a report that you were seen at Beckington, but I knew better but let it go, so much the better that they are ignorant.’ However, the authorities were not ignorant. These letters were intercepted and forwarded back to Read in Wiltshire.⁶⁶ They probably had been sent via George Palmer, a Leeds shoemaker, who acted both as post box and agent for the union. This link was discovered, possibly by agents working for the Leeds merchant and magistrate, William Cookson, during the course of the Wiltshire Outrages. Thereafter, all correspondence going to Palmer was routinely intercepted and read.⁶⁷ Did Joseph take fright and simply stay in Yorkshire? This seems unlikely since the Yorkshire croppers would have known who he was and the key role that he was destined to play. Moreover, he would not have found work in the cropping shops without their blessing. It is distinctly possible, therefore, that he was prevented from returning by agents of the state. His absence probably sent Thomas to the gallows. Others had the power to save Helliker with far stronger testimony than that which Warren might have offered. As noted, Heath had three servants with him on the night of 22 July 1802. At least one of them, John Pearce, made a statement soon after the attack. It contradicted in several ways that testimony given by his employer. According to Heath, the men who had rushed into the cottage had all been armed, the leader carrying a musket, Helliker, the second man to enter the room, carrying a pistol, and the rest carrying an assortment of firearms. He also stated that the men, including Helliker, had their faces blackened. When crossexamined at the assizes, Heath stated that Helliker’s face had still been recognizable, even though it was blacked. When asked why it had taken him several days before he identified Helliker, he stated that he had not identified him straightaway ‘from a dread that his life was in danger if it had been understood that he could convict him’. This was a plausible explanation. Pearce’s deposition, however, made shortly after the attack and before that of Heath, stated that only one man, the ‘short’ man who had entered first and who was plainly the leader, had had a blackened face or carried a pistol; the rest, he deposed, had their coats pulled up to disguise themselves and carried bayonets fixed on poles. This contradiction suggests at least some questions as to Heath’s ⁶⁶ HO 42/66, Read to King, 3 October 1802, enclosures from Waller, May. ⁶⁷ Randall, Before the Luddites, 132–3.
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memory. Heath had been keen to present himself in an heroic light. When the men left, he had, he claimed, immediately followed to see whether he might save the mill, but had been ordered back inside. Later, ‘at the hazard of his life’, he had managed to save some cloths before the conflagration overwhelmed the building. Pearce’s testimony suggested otherwise. According to him, when the shearmen declared that they intended to burn the mill, Heath had replied, ‘burn it down or let it stand. We can’t hinder you, if you burn it down I shall sleep in peace which I have not done for a good while.’ Pearce also stated that the leader of the shearmen had taken the child lying upstairs in the cottage and handed it to Mrs Heath, the mother, with the injunction that ‘what cloths were in her husband’s care he might get out as quick as he could’. These presumably were the cloths that Heath saved. The Heath of Pearce’s deposition rings true: a tired, frightened, and resigned employee who had been too long left by Naish without the military support that other target mills enjoyed. But Pearce also stated, damningly for any faith that one might have for Heath’s veracity: ‘Mr Heath never looked up the whole time the men were present but kept his hat on his face looking at the ground, this was the whole time after the first man appeared.’⁶⁸ Pearce was seemingly never asked to confirm his draft statement, neither was he nor the other two servants who had shared the ordeal called to give testimony at Helliker’s trial. The sole witness for the prosecution was Heath. He confidently stated that ‘he verily believes that the said Thomas Hilliker to have been a ringleader and Principal in the offence.’⁶⁹ With the £500 reward nestling in his pocket⁷⁰ and the shearmen apparently defeated, it was no time to suggest uncertainty. Heath’s testimony condemned Helliker. Helliker’s counsel, a Mr Garrow, who had been ‘engaged on a special retainer, with Messrs Jekyll and Borrough’, itself evidence of the continuing financial strength and resolution of the shearmen to save their young colleague, tried hard to find weaknesses in Heath’s evidence. He ‘endeavoured to show that as the men who entered the factory were disguised, it would be impossible for anyone to know their features; and he examined Mr Heath whether he had not confessed that he could not swear to the prisoner.’ Heath stuck to his story. The jury deliberated for about ten minutes, during which time Helliker was in great agitation. When at length they pronounced him guilty, he appeared as if relieved from a torturing suspense, and to assume a degree of fortitude to encounter his fate and which he retained when the sentence of death was pronounced. He is a good looking youth, only nineteen years old. He is left for execution.⁷¹
Thomas Helliker was left to languish for a week before the execution, during which time frantic efforts seem to have been made to secure a reprieve. They were ⁶⁸ ⁶⁹ ⁷⁰ ⁷¹
KB 1/31/Pt 2, signed draft deposition of John Pearce, n.d. HO 42/66, information of Ralph Heath, 6 August 1802. HO 42/66, Jones to Pelham, 3 August 1802. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 14 March 1803.
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in vain. On 22 March 1803, he was taken from his cell to the gallows outside the prison at Fisherton. Even the press that had condemned the shearmen’s campaign of violence could not forebear some sympathy for the boy. Hilliker, ere this, bore a fair character for his station in life, and after his conviction his behaviour was decent and resigned. At the scaffold he betrayed neither unmanly fear nor audacious daring. His youth, and his falling a victim to a party, caused much commiseration for his fate; but the object in which he had been engaged, followed, as it generally is, with violence, anarchy, and misery, prevented the success of powerful applications in his behalf; since a severe example was necessary to put down such illegal combinations.⁷²
His body was placed on a cart and brought back across the chalky tracks of the empty unenclosed Wiltshire plains, echoing to the sounds of sheepbells and skylarks. As the cart left the upland ‘chalk’ and descended to the ‘cheese’ of the vale, passing through the textile-making villages, a procession gradually formed the funeral cortege and, before reaching Thomas’s home town of Trowbridge, it was met by a large number of girls, dressed in white who provided an honour guard for the dead boy. An ‘immense’ crowd, their number swelled by representatives of the Yorkshire croppers, insisted that Thomas would be buried in the churchyard of the large parish church of St James. The vicar was absent and the curate was compelled to bury Thomas with full Christian rites. There his body lies to this day, since the attempts of the returning vicar to disinter him were firmly resisted.⁷³ A gravestone was erected ‘at his earnest request’ by the shearmen of Yorkshire, Wiltshire, and Somerset to commemorate his memory. The first stone made suitably dutiful noises about contrition: ‘He died a true penitent, being very anxious in his last moments that others might take a timely warning and avoid evil company.’ But when the old stones fell into disrepair, the cloth workers of the new industry rebuilt the tomb with a panel of their own which reflected what local opinion had all along believed: ‘he was afterwards believed to be innocent but determined rather to die than give testimony which would have saved his life but forfeited the lives of others.’ Thomas Helliker’s tomb stands there today, a powerful reminder of the very real human cost of ‘riotous assemblies’. ⁷² Ibid., 28 March 1803. ⁷³ K. G. Ponting, The Woollen Industry of South-West England (Bath, 1971), 107; K. Rogers, The Book of Trowbridge (Barracuda Books, Buckingham, 1984), 93.
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Index Abingdon 105, 311, 326 Ainsworth, Richard 268 Alderley, Glos. 113 Aldham, Suffolk 319 Ampney 105, 311 Andrews, Thomas 56, 142–3 Anson, Admiral George 54, 191, 191 n.29, 207 Anson, Thomas, of Shugborough 156, 185, 191–2, 193 Anstie, John 248, 258 apprenticeship 125, 304 repeal in 1814 323 Arkwright, Richard 146, 244–5 army, and civil order 38–41 London billeting 38 soldiers as food rioters 206, 210, 230 and Luddite disturbances 292–3 changing attitudes towards 322 Arnold, Notts. 147, 277, 278 Ashton under Lyne 214 Ashton, Wilts. 95 Avarne, Revd Thomas 157 Axbridge 171 Bagendon 105 Bailey, Brian 294 Bailey, Thomas 258, 296, 328 Baines, John 296–7, 299 Balder Bridge 165 Bamford and Cook 254 Banbury 227, 308 Bank of England 203, 205, 206 Baptists 153, 317 Baring, Charles 188–9 Barnstaple 320 Barrington, Lord 40 Baswell 277 Bath 79, 108, 139, 215, 227, 232, 233, 237, 242, 254, 265, 316 anti-Catholic riot, 1780 203–4 Bathurst, 3rd Earl 282 Bathurst, Colonel 117 Bayley, Thomas B. 221, 227, 262 Bayliss, James 175, 177, 325–6 Beazer John 15–16, 142, 324, 326 Becher, Revd Thomas 281, 298 Beckington, Wilts. 94, 100, 114, 329 Bedford, 4th Duke of 168, 169, 190, 192 Bedfordshire 71 militia riots 168–9, 171
Bedmead, Richard 118 Bedminster 162, 175, 176 Bedworth 113, 116, 216 Beer tax 63 Beeston, Notts. 278 Beeston, Yorks. 165 Behagg, Clive 127 Bell, John 254 Berkeley Castle 104 Berkeley, 5th Earl of 102, 114 Berkhamstead 169 Berkshire 92, 321 Beverley 170 Bexley 224 Bible, The 76–7, 86 Bideford 73 Biggleswade 168, 173 Billingham 109 Billingsley, John 240, 241 Binfield, Kevin 271 n.1, 297, 298, 299 Birkacre 244–5 Birmingham 5, 24, 46, 51, 81, 101, 127, 192, 193, 204, 211–12, 216, 221–3, 226, 230, 314–18 Birmingham Flour and Bread Company 222–3 Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire 184 Bisley, Glos. 118, 264 Black Act of 1723 48–9, 164, 175, 325 Black, Jeremy 39 Blackburn 216, 249 anti-jenny riots 244, 245 Blackfriars Bridge 203, 205 Blakeney 211 Blidworth 278 Bohstedt, John 6, 10, 43, 102, 103, 108, 118, 299, 308 categorising riots 218, 219, 223, 224, 225 counting riots 104 Bold Defiance, silk weavers’ secret society 145 Bollington 290 Bolton 5, 227, 260, 289, 291 anti-jenny riots 244, 245 Booth, John 286 boroughs, parliamentary 80–1 Boston 169, 318 Bradford, Yorks. 165 Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts. 121, 139, 140, 247–8, 254, 255, 256, 308, 326 Bradley, Wilts. 93, 100, 109 Bramley, Yorks. 246
346 Bratton, Wilts. 153 bread, staple diet of the poor 73–5 Assize of Bread 75–6 Brewer, John 12 Bridgnorth 184 Bridgwater 48, 87, 225 Brief Institution 251, 296, 327–8, 329 see also cloth dressers Brighouse 165 Brighton 224 Brimscombe 223 Brindley, Richard 157 Bristol 5, 12, 24, 33, 47, 51, 62, 72, 78, 91, 108, 111, 115, 119, 129, 131, 161–3, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 203, 210, 215, 217, 220, 222, 226, 230, 233, 237, 305, 320 turnpike trust 161–3 Brixworth, Northampton 50–1 Brook, James 285 Brook, Joseph 285 Bruton, Somerset 111 Buckinghamshire, militia riots 171 Bulwell 277 Burke, Edmund 88–9, 183, 205, 236, 238, 301 Burn, Revd Richard 34, 85 Burnett, John 74 Burton, Daniel and Sons, Middleton 290, 295, 300 Bushaway, R. W. 9 Byron, Lord 282, 302 Bythell, Duncan 260 Caistor, Lincs. 318 Calhoun, Craig 294 Calne 154, 183 Cambridge 47, 52 Cambridgeshire 160 militia riots 169 Camelford 184–5 Cannock 156 Cannock Chase 156–9, 175, 177–8 Cannon, John 182 Canterbury 24, 230 Carles, Justice Joseph 316 Cartwright, Edmund 288 Cartwright, William 283, 286, 287, 298 Castle Cary 111 Catholicism, hostility towards 49, 50, 52, 53, 200–6 Catholic Relief Act of 1778 200 ceremony, election 185 use in riots 306–8 see also Cider Tax Chalford 264 Chandler, Thomas 114, 326
Index Charlesworth, Andrew 6, 213, 219, 223, 299 Charnwood Forest 155, 156, 172, 177–8 Chatham 128, 230 Cheltenham 62 Cheshire 182, 288 Chester 114, 183–4, 189, 207 Chesterfield 216 Chetwynd, William 190 Chichester 82, 224, 230 Chippenham 83, 117, 142, 162, 171, 176, 184 Chippindale, Captain W. 291 Church and King mobs 315–18 Church of England 153 crowd support for 46–7, 50, 51–2, 53 Cider Tax, opposition to 60–3, 306 Cirencester 12, 72, 104, 105, 106, 177, 215, 311 City of London 59, 181, 206 Cleckheaton 165 Clissold, John 105 cloth dressers, work and employment 127, 251, 304–5, 327 and machinery 251–2 Wiltshire Outrages 251–9, 294, 313, 327–31 coal heavers 134, 198, 199 coal miners, see colliers Cobbett, William 34, 55, 179, 181, 184, 207, 323 Colchester 65, 111 weavers’ strike 137 Coldham, Thomas 281, 282, 283, 298 collective bargaining by riot 124, 294 Collet, John, of London 36–7 Collett, John, of Alderley 113 Colley, Linda 52, 54, 322 colliers 5, 33, 98, 108, 111, 119, 129–32, 140, 183, 210–11, 214, 216, 217, 245, 290 strikes 130–2 and anti-militia disturbances 172 Bedworth 113, 216 Bollington and Rainow 290 Bond 129–31 Forest of Dean 33, 62, 108, 154, 210–11, 214, 233, 309 Keynsham 243 Kingswood 33, 98, 108, 119, 131–2, 140, 161, 172, 174 Kingswood, opposition to turnpikes 161–2, 163, 174, 175 Mendip 109, 111 Northumberland and Durham 130–1, 172, 213 Paulton 163 Shropshire 103, 217 Colne 52
Index combinations 122–3, 124, 126–9, 251, 252, 258, 294 Combination Acts of 1799/1800 123 Cook, Samuel 253–4 Cooke, Mary 100 Cookson, William 329 Cooper, John 139, 140 Cornwall 5, 106 food riots 106–7, 118–19, 120, 213, 320 see also tin miners Cotton Arbitration Acts, 1800 and 1804 262–3, 305, 322 cotton weavers, see weavers Cotton, Sir John Hindle. MP 27 Coulthurst, Henry 15–16, 141–2, 148, 324 country people and popular protest 69, 152–78, 309, 318–20 Coventry 5, 79, 113, 116, 145, 194, 195, 216, 306, 308 Cowley, Glos. 118 Crabb, John 142 Cratchley, Stephen 114, 121, 326 Crediton 138 crimp house riots, 1794 305 croppers, see cloth dressers Crosland Moor 284 crowds, and mobs 16–17 see also riots custom 9 customary society 9, 10, 303 Dallaway, William 42, 87, 102, 104, 112, 113, 116, 117, 120–1, 310 Darvall, F. O. 92 Davies, David 74 De Veil, Col. Thomas 21–3, 43 dealers and middlemen 76, 78, 79, 81–4, 85, 99, 214, 225, 231, 232, 238, 239, 305, 306 Defoe, Daniel 82 Delph 212 Denbighshire 171 Derbyshire 5, 278 militia riots 169 Devizes 53, 117, 171, 184, 204, 255, 310 Devonshire 111, 219, 321 food riots 92, 111, 213 Dewsbury 110, 306 Dickinson, H. T. 186 Dinwiddy, J. R. 294 Dissenters 314–18 meeting house riots 50–1, 200, 316 see also Priestley riots Dobson, Rodney 124, 305 Doncaster 170 Dorchester 47 Dorset 92, 154 Dowdeswell, William, M.P 60, 63
347
Drake, Dr, Rector of Rochdale 213 Drayton, Berks 326 Ducie, Lord 104 Dudley 222 Duntze, John 189 Durham, County 118, 119, 233 militia riots 171–2 food riots 213 Dursley 162 Dyke, William 73 Dyson, Clement 287 Earle, Giles 139 East Anglia 80 food riots 111, 213 ‘Revolt of the field’, 1816 323 Easthorpe 319 Ecland, Daniel 319, 326–7 Eden, Sir F. M. 152, 250 Edgley 290 Edinburgh 40–1 Edwards, Allun, constable 287 elections, parliamentary 46, 181–2 Last Determinations Act, 1729 182 Triennial Act, 1694 181 Septennial Act, 1715 48, 181–2 Ellenborough, 1st Baron 26, 237 Essex 111, 118 food riots 213 militia riots 169 Excise crisis 58–60, 184 Exeter 12, 61, 62, 92, 189, 217, 233 weavers 138 woolsorters 127 Fairford 105, 311 Falmouth 107, 118–19, 120 farmers 72–3, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 168, 170, 172–5, 176, 192, 231, 238–9, 305, 306, 325 Farnham Market 82 Fielding, Sir John 145 Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl 227, 252, 287 Fleet prison 44, 202, 320 Fletcher, Colonel 289, 291, 293 flying shuttle 313 food riots 73, 80, 83, 89, 91–121, 209–39, 303, 311, 312, 321 and country people 153–4, 224–5 see also moral economy footmen 21–3, 43, 311 Forest of Dean 33, 62, 108, 154, 210–11, 214, 233, 309 Foster, Joseph 285 Frame Breakers’ Act of 1812 282, 295, 296, 298, 323
348
Index
framework knitters 146–7, 276–83, 296, 297, 298, 302 Charter 276, 280, 298 petition, 1812 283 Framework Knitters’ Company 276, 296, 298 United Committee 283 Franklin, Benjamin 1, 197, 198 free-born Englishman 17–18, 44–5, 68, 185, 199, 207, 305, 311, 316, 325 Freshford 310 Frome 47, 93, 111, 117, 232, 240, 243, 248 Fyfield 154 Gainsborough 318 Gamingay 169 Garside, Thomas 271, 272, 290–1 Gateshead 171–2 Gatton, Surrey 181 Gay, John 57–8 gig mill 251, 252–3, 256, 257, 259, 268, 284, 295 Girdler, Joseph 235 Glastonbury 67 gleaning 319–20 Glen, Robert 220 Gloucester 24, 79, 86, 98, 102, 113, 154, 160, 164 market 102, 182, 226, 233 Gloucestershire 92, 102, 111, 113, 118, 226, 243, 248, 252, 264, 321, 323 bench 71, 79, 230, 248 militia riots 169, 175, 318 weavers’ strike in 1756 149–51 Goodair and Co, Edgley 290 Gordon Riots 200–6, 207, 208, 306, 309, 316, 323 riot in Bath 203–4, 316 Gordon, Lord George 200, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208 Gott, Benjamin 252 Great Yarmouth 184 Grosvenor, Lord 282 Gwyn, Captain 65 Haden, Revd Alexander 232 Halifax 286, 296 Hammond, J. L. & B. 147, 294 Hampshire 154 Hamstall Ridware 193 Hanson, Joseph 268–9 Hardwicke, 1st Earl of 32, 33, 169 Harewood Bridge 165 Hargreaves, James 241, 244 Harrison, Mark 16 Hartley, Samuel 286 Haselmere 82
Hay, Douglas 30, 74, 234, 236, 237 Haydon, Colin 200, 204, 205, 207 Hayne, Thomas 281 Haywood, Staffs. 156 Heath, Ralph 256, 257, 258, 328, 329–30 Heckmondwike 286 Helliker (Elliker), John 327 Helliker (Elliker), Thomas 257, 258, 327–31 Henson, Gravenor 147, 283, 296, 298 Henstridge, Somerset 47–8 Hereford 113, 115, 154, 164 Hertfordshire 160 militia riots 169 Hexham 172 highwaymen 5 Hilperton 228 Hinchcliffe, William 284 Hirst, Mr, at Marsh 284 Hobbes, Thomas 77 Hobsbawm, E. J. 124 Holbeck 127 Holcroft, James 262 Hollingworth, Edward 278 Holmfirth 271, 285 Honiton 179, 195, 207, 313 Honley 284 Horbury 285 Horncastle 318 Horningsham 253 Horsfall,William 283, 287, 298 hosiers 275–6, 277, 278, 295, 298 Huddersfield 252, 284, 285, 286, 287 Manufacturers’ Committee 284 Hull 204 Huntingdonshire, militia riots 160, 169, 171 Huntspill, Somerset 86 Hutton, William 316 Hyde, Justice 202, 206 Ilminster 62 Irish, labourers 36, 153 and Gordon riots 201, 204 Jackson, Randle 266 Jacobinism and food riots 218, 220, 225–9, 239, 299 Jacobitism 2, 11, 192–3, 195 Jacobite Risings 24, 47, 190 ‘Jacobite’ weavers 140 Jessop, Walter Hilton 264–5 Jew Bill, 1753 51, 53 Johnson, Dr Samuel 8 Jones, John, Jr 255–6, 257, 265, 268, 310 Jones, John, Sr 310 justices of the peace 28–35, 71–9, 124, 141, 158, 160, 162, 165, 168, 169, 206, 214, 217, 223–4, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230,
Index 231, 232, 258, 273, 298, 299, 304, 309, 309–10, 313–14, 316, 317 borough magistrates 33–4 set wage rates 141, 149–50, 305 threatened 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 175, 309 Bedfordshire 168 Bradford-on-Avon 140 Chippenham 142 Coventry 113, 116 Devizes 310 Durham 118 Gloucestershire 71, 79, 230, 248 Hertfordshire 169 Kidderminster 116 Lancashire 245, 309 Liverpool 114 Manchester 114, 262, 263, 268–9 Rochdale 213, 269 Shropshire 235 Somerset 71, 79 Staffordshire 232, 235 Tiverton 187 Trowbridge 139 Wiltshire 71 Worcester 116 Yorkshire 118, 309 keelmen 132–3 Kent 215, 224, 230, 235 militia riots 169, 171 Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice 234–7, 238, 239 Keppel, Admiral 54 Keynsham 243–4 Kidderminster 101, 113, 116 King, Peter 7, 319 King’s Bench prison 320 and riot, 1791 320 Kings Langley 152 Kings Lynn 216 Kingswood 33, 98, 108, 119, 131–2, 140, 161, 172, 174 see also colliers Kittlety, James 121, 326 Lacy, Charles 279 Lamberhurst 224 Lancashire 74, 81, 212, 214, 227, 244, 275, 288 Lancaster 215 Landau, Norma 9, 28, 29, 31, 34 Langdale, Thomas 202 Lascelles, Edwin 165 Lavington, Wilts. 154 law, ‘bloody code’ 27–8 Lechlade 105, 311 Ledbury 160, 164, 172, 173, 175, 177, 325
349
Leeds 127, 165, 170, 173, 246, 252, 284, 285 Leek 50 Leicester 101, 113, 298 Leicestershire 85, 155, 275, 278 bench 71, 282 Leigh, Lancs. 234 Leveson-Gower, Granville, 1st Marquess of Stafford 185, 190–4 Lichfield 50, 185, 190–4, 195, 207 Limpley Stoke 91, 256 Lincoln 169, 318 Lincolnshire, justices 176 militia riots 169, 318 Littleton mill 256, 257, 327–8 Liverpool 114 magistrates 114 seamen’s strike, 1775 135–6 Liverpool, Lord 76 Lloyd, John 293, 295 Lloyd, Nathaniel 307 London 5, 12, 76, 81, 86, 108, 112, 133–5, 305, 306, 312, 325 food riots 216 Mugite riots 47 seamen’s strike, 1768 133–5 Tower Hamlets riot 36–7 crimp house riots 305 London Corresponding Society 17–18, 225, 228, 314 Long Benton 131 Longdon, Staffs. 156, 157 loomshops 264 Luddism 271–302, 309 Ludd, Nedd 271, 272, 273, 280, 283, 296, 298, 301 ‘General Ludd’ 287, 290, 294, 298 General Ludd’s wives 290 in Nottinghamshire 275–83 in Yorkshire 283–8 in Lancashire 288–91 and popular protest 293–302 and arms thefts 287, 291 and radical politics 274 and oath-taking 296–7 and trade unionism 295–6 and community response 281, 286, 300 as sea-change in authority-crowd relationship 300–2 Ludlow 103 Lunar Society 314, 317 Lyford, John 326 Macclesfield 145 food riot 290, 320 Madeley 103 Maghull 135
350 magistrates, see justices of the peace Maidstone 73 Maitland, General 288, 292 Malmesbury 69, 102 Manchester 5, 46–7, 50, 81, 111, 114, 212, 219, 220, 221, 231, 245, 262, 288, 289, 290, 292, 299 Mansfield 169 Mansfield, Lord 202, 205, 207, 208 Market Harborough 166 markets 69–70 growth of a national market 80–1 grain, Bear Quay 81 Mark Lane 81, 216 bounty system 81 market regulation 75–81 forestalling, regrating and engrossing 76, 80, 234 repeal of regulatory statutes, 1772 209 Kenyon seeks to revive 234–7 weights and measures 69–73, 79, 84, 154, 235, 321 Marlborough 253 Marshall, William 85 Marsland, Peter 289, 290 Marston Bigot 110 May, James 328, 329 May, William 329 Meeting house riots, see Dissenters Melbourne 280 Melksham 15, 118, 142, 154, 257, 324 weavers’ riots 141–3, 148 Mere, Wilts. 319 Methodists, riots against 51, 52, 53, 200 middlemen, see dealers and middlemen Middlesex, elections in 1768 and 1769 196, 198 militia riots 169 Middleton 290, 295 militia 35–7, 119, 178, 210, 230 Militia Act of 1757 119, 166–7, 322 of 1758 170–1 Militia riots 168–72, 310, 318 Bedfordshire 171 Buckinghamshire 171 Denbighshire 171 Derbyshire 169 Durham 171–2 Essex 169 Gloucestershire 169 Middlesex 169 Norfolk 169 Warwickshire 171 Yorkshire 169–70 millers 72, 108, 109–11 Minchinhampton 104, 105, 114, 311 Minehead 233
Index miners, see colliers, tin miners Mitcheldene 210, 211 Modbury 217 Moir, Esther 29, 31, 32 Monmouth 62, 210 Montague, James 81, 83 moral economy 4–5, 6–8, 9, 96–7, 120, 219, 237–8, 239, 259, 303, 304, 313, 314, 322, 323 and legitimising notion 303, 305 ‘moral economy reviewed’ 303–4 moral economy of the trade 261, 263, 266, 298, 301, 302 Morpeth 172 Musson, A. E. 124 Nadin, Joseph 293 Nailsea 163 Naish, Francis 256, 257, 327, 328 Namier, Sir Lewis 55, 186 Natural Law 77, 238 Neale, John 105 Need, Mr, hosier 146 Neeson, Jeanette 155, 173, 174, 319 Newbury 101 Newcastle upon Tyne 12, 109, 113, 118, 130, 132, 133, 204 Newcastle, 1st Duke of 45, 322 Newcastle, 4th Duke of 277, 278, 279, 281–2 Newcastle under Lyme 50, 190 Newman, Paul 254, 257 newspapers: availability and shaping opinion 11–15, 149, 199, 203, 232, 253, 266, 279, 280, 281 reporting food shortages and riots 87, 99, 115, 220, 222, 232–3 Newton, John 256 Norfolk 92, 213 food riots 213 militia riots 169, 318 North Shields 134 North, Lord 202, 205 Northampton 50–1, 166, 318 Northamptonshire 174 militia riots 169, 172 Northumberland, food riots 213 Norton 109 Norwich 5, 12, 24, 78, 204 food riots 92, 100, 115, 118, 213, 223, 228, 306, 318 Nottingham 92, 112, 118, 146, 216, 271, 277, 278, 279, 301 Corporation ‘secret committee’ 280, 298 Nottinghamshire 273, 275, 282 militia riots 169 Nunney 254
Index O’Gorman, Frank 182 Oastler, Richard 323 Oatlands mill 284 Ogburn St Andrew 154 Old Sarum 181 Oldbury 104 Oldham 5, 212, 229, 269, 291, 299 Oswaldtwistle 244 Otiwells mill, Marsden 283, 287 Oxford 46, 71, 78, 82 food riots 100, 113, 213, 229, 232, 235 Packer, John 110 Padstow 101 Paganhill 104, 114, 121, 326 Paget, see Uxbridge Paine, Thomas 294, 305, 317 Painswick 102, 110 Palmer, George 329 parish constable 35 Parliament, House of Commons, representation 179–82 paternalism 76–7, 108, 117–18, 121 model of marketing 78–9 Paul, Sir George 226, 231 Paulton 163 Pearce, John 329–30 Peard, Oliver 188 Peel, Robert 244 Pendle, Forest of 51, 52 Penryn 107 Perceval, Spencer, MP 268, 301 Perkin, Harold 7 petty sessions 30–1 Petworth 224 Phelps, Joseph 247–8 Pickard, James 211–12, 221, 226 Pitt, Hester and Jane 100 Pitt, John 114 Pitt, John, land steward to Lord Hardwicke 79, 83–4, 114 defence of the free market 120 Pitt, William 71–2 Pitt, William, Prime Minister 229, 236, 238, 262, 317, 322 Plomer, Thomas 267 Plymouth 217, 223, 320 Poole, Steven 234 Porteous, Captain John 40–1 Portland, Duke of 229, 230 Portsmouth 128 posse comitatus 35, 109, 119 Poulshot 248 power loom 288, 289, 290, 291, 295 Pownall, Thomas 235 press, see newspapers Preston 183
351
Priestley, Dr Joseph 314–18 Priestley Riots, 1791 315–18 Prinn, Anselm 121, 326 Protestantism 50–3, 205, 206 Protestant Association 200–1, 203, 204, 206 Pryke, Justice 309 Pulteney, William, MP 27, 45 quarter sessions 28–30, 123, 141, 149, 150 rabbit warrens, see warrens Radcliffe, Joseph 293, 295 Radcliffe, William 260, 289 Radzinowicz, Sir Leon 49 Raikes, Robert 12, 80, 95, 108, 324 Ramsbury 227 Ratten, Timothy 113 Raunds 319 Rawfolds mill 283, 286, 287, 295, 300 Raynes, Captain Francis 293 Read, James 257–8, 259, 328, 329 Reading 326 Redbrook 108, 214 Redruth 107, 320 Reynolds, Thomas 164, 175, 177, 325–6 Rich, John 20, 58 n.42 Richards, Joseph 110 Richmond, 2nd Duke of 65, 66 Richmond, 3rd Duke of 207 Riot Act, 1 George I, st.2, c.5, ‘An Act for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies, and for the more speedy and effectual punishing the rioters’ 22, 24–8 rioters: behaviour 218, 219, 223, 224, 225 and community 311–12 counting 104, 108, 118 honesty 106 leadership 310 mobility 310–11 models of behaviour 304–11 orderliness 103, 310 symbolism 306–7 theatre of riot 120, 121 violence 309 Roberson, Reverend Hammond 295 Rochdale 213, 231, 269 Rockingham, Lord 170 Rodborough 223 Rogers, Nicholas 11, 26, 186, 204, 205 Rollison, David 9 Rooke, General 230 Ross on Wye 164, 214, Rowbottom, George 271 Rowbottom, William, diarist 209, 212, 214, 217–18, 229, 268, 269, 275, 289 Royston 169
352
Index
Rudé, George 3, 16, 186, 205, 206, 323 Rugeley 156, 157, 158 Rule, John 65, 127, 148 Rusby, John 216, 236, 237 Ruscombe 100 Russell, William 317 Rutland 180 impact of jenny 250 Ryder, Nathaniel 189 Ryder, Richard, MP 282–3 Sacheverell, Dr Henry 46 Sackville, Lord George 169 Saddleworth 226 St Albans 59, 153 St George’s Fields, London, ‘Massacre’ in 1768 198, 201, 206 St George’s Fields, Manchester 268–9 Salisbury 24, 73, 92, 102, 109, 115, 163, 181, 210, 257, 258 Schwarz, Leonard 143 Scott, James C. 19, 154, 311 scribblers 247, 248, 249 scribbling engine 246, 308, 313 opposition to 246–9 Seaford 230 seamen 133–6, 306 Liverpool strike, 1775 135–6 London strike, 1768 133–5, 198 Sevenoaks 169 Shaw, Wilts. 319 shearing frame 251, 256, 259, 268, 283–4, 285, 288, 295 shearmen, see cloth dressers Sheffield 112, 170 food riot 320 Sheldon, Richard 90 Shepton Mallet 90, 109, 111, 240, 241, 242, 248, 249 Shifnal 103 shipwrights 127–9 shoemakers 42 Shropshire 103, 182, 184, 235 Sidmouth, Lord 283 skill 124–5 Skipp, Justice 175, 325 Smith, Adam 84, 89–90, 236, 238 ‘Dr Smith’s Disciples’ 283, 298, 301, 305, 321 Smith, Charles 74, 87–8 Smith, Mr, ‘Shearing Frame Holder’ 271–2, 285, 301 smuggling 64–6 Snell, Keith 125 Somerset 84, 111, 162, 163, 172, 175, 213, 242, 249, 311, 319 Somerton 232
South Sea Bubble 56–8, 162 South Shields 132 spinners 290 spinning jenny 241, 243 opposition to 241–4, 313 and unemployment 243 riots against large jennies 244–5 Spitalfields Act of 1773 145, 262, 263, 268, 305 model for other trades 146, 305 Stafford 50, 158, 190 Staffordshire 71, 110, 190 bench 232, 235 Stanhill 244 Statute of Artificers, 1563 122 Staverton 255–6, 257, 268 Stevenson, John 153, 171 Stock Exchange, London 46 stockingers, see framework knitters Stockport 220, 271, 289, 290, 295, 299 Stockton on Tees 35, 97–8, 109, 113, 119 Stogursey 225, 238–9 Stoksley 53, 306 Stone 50 Stonehouse 104, 164 Stow-on-the-Wold 318 strikes 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128–9, 130–2, 133–6, 137, 139–40, 146, 147, 148, 150, 254, 255, 256 Colchester weavers’ strike 137 cotton weavers’ strike, 1808 268 Gloucestershire weavers’ strike, 1756 150–1 seamen’s strikes 133–6 ceremony in strikes 148–9 Strode, John 240 Stroud 6, 33, 61, 69, 72, 102, 104, 141, 162, 223 Suffolk 213 Sunderland 134 Supporters of the Bill of Rights, Society for 198 Surrey 85, 206 militia riots 169 Sussex 71, 73, 224 militia riots 171 Sutton-in-Ashfield 277, 278 Swallow, Samuel 284 Swing Riots of 1830 311, 323 tailors 122–4 Tailors’ Combination Act of 1721 122 Taunton 109, 138, 163, 178, 217, 231 election disorders 194–5 taxation, resistance to 53–66 Teakle, John 307 Temple, William, clothier 142–3, 147, 149, 247
Index Tetbury 69, 70, 72–3, 84, 104, 215, 306 Tewkesbury 46, 71, 73, 79, 86, 210 textile workers, see cloth dressers, scribblers, spinners, weavers Theatre Royal, Drury Lane 20–3, 63 Thomis, Malcolm 294, 295 Thompson, Edward 3, 4, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 54–5, 73, 76, 90, 97, 103, 115, 120, 206, 218, 225, 237, 288, 293, 301, 303, 308, 314 see also moral economy Thompson, William 285 Thomson, James 44 Thwaites, Wendy 82 tin miners (tinners) 98, 101, 106–7, 111, 113, 118–19, 320 Tiverton 138, 141, 186–9, 306 weavers 138, 141, 308 election riots 186–9, 195, 207 Totnes 223 Trentham, William 283 Trowbridge 15, 93, 120, 139, 140, 141, 147, 215, 248, 255, 256, 257, 327, 328 weavers 139, 140, 141 Truro 117, 320 Tucker, Dean Josiah 51, 121 Tugwell, Thomas 255 turnpikes 8, 159–60, 305 riots against 160–6, 309, 325–6 Twerton, Bath 254, 256, 257 Uley, Glos. 226, 307–8 United Englishmen 226, 299 Upton upon Severn 86 Urchfont 117 Uttoxeter 193 Uxbridge, 2nd Earl of 156–9, 175 Vale of Evesham 83 Vaughan, George 139–40 Vickermann, Francis 285 Vogler, Richard 26 Waddington, Samuel 236, 237 wage fixing 123, 141 repeal of the clauses in the 1563 Act 323 Wahrman, Dror 8–9 Wakefield 285 Waller, Ann 328, 329–30 Walpole, Robert, Prime Minister 31, 32, 49, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 182, 303, 308 Walsall 50, 53, 193 Walters, Elizabeth 176, 325 Waltham Blacks 49 Wansey, Henry 254–5 Warminster 6, 117, 240, 254–5, 258 Warren, Joseph 328–9
353
Warren, Peter 254–5 warrens, riots: Cannock Chase 156–9, 175, 177–8 Charnwood 155, 177–8 Sussex 156 Warwickshire 192 militia riots 171 Wattleton, Berks. 47–8 weavers 15, 72, 241, 307–8 carpet 308 cotton: 260–3, 288–9, 295–6, 299, 302 Association of Cotton Weavers 260–3 strike, 1808 268–9 woollen: Bristol 141 Woollen Cloth Weavers’ Society 264–5 ‘Jacobite’ 140 Crediton 138 Exeter 138 Taunton 138 Tiverton 138, 141, 188 Trowbridge 139, 140, 141 strikes: Colchester 137 Melksham 141–3, 148 Gloucestershire 149–50 silk: Spitalfields 143–5, 151, 143–5, 306 disputes and riots 144–5, 151 ‘Bold Defiance’ secret society 145 Webb, S. & B. 30, 124, 127 Webb, William 307 Wedgwood, Josiah 244–5, 249 Wednesbury 51, 53 weights and measures, see market weights and measures Welch, Saunders 41–2 Wellingborough 318 Wellington, Shropshire 103, 217 Wellington, Somerset 217 Wells, Roger 209, 213, 215, 219, 238 Wells, Somerset 230 Wenlock 103 Wesley, John 177 West Bromwich 50 Westbury, Wilts. 95, 248 Westbury Leigh 143 Western, J. R. 171 Westhoughton 291 White, Revd George 52 Whitehaven 165–6, 232 Whitmore, Sir Thomas, MP 184 wide frames 276, 277, 278, 279 Wigan 215, 245, 249 Wigley, E. 267 Wigston Magna 174 Wilbarston, Northants. 319 Wildley, Joseph 121 Wilkes, John 133, 134, 195, 203 ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ 196–9, 206
354
Index
Williams Wynn, Watkin 183–4, 207 Williams, D. E. 97, 102, 103, 308 Willoughby, Sir Henry 170 Wiltshire 92, 110, 111, 163, 213, 243, 253, 264 bench 71, 139, 140, 142 Wiltshire Outrages, 1802 251–9, 264, 294, 327–31 Windsor 49, 227 Winslow, Cal 65 Witney 117, 319 Wolfe, James 38, 39–40, 150, 171 Wolverhampton 50, 53, 71, 81, 84, 235 women, and riots 100, 101, 109, 112–13, 212, 224, 232, 312, 319 and riots against turnpikes 176, 312 and resistance to machinery 241, 243, 313
Woodchester 104, 248 Woodforde, James, Parson 64–5 Woodstock 317 woolcombers 308 woolsorters 127 Woolwich 128 Worcester 12, 61, 114, 116, 164 Wotton under Edge 33, 223, 230 Wright, John 281 Wynn, Sir Rowland 170 Yardley Gobion, Northants. 175 Yeomanry 37 York 170, 173 Yorkshire 118, 172, 180, 215, 246, 275 militia riots 169–70 turnpike riots 165 Young, Arthur 129, 159
