BUT what of the denizens of ‘Satan’s strongholds’, the ‘harlots and publicans and thieves’ whose souls the evangelists wrestled for? If we are concerned with historical change we must attend to the articulate minorities. But these minorities arise from a less articulate majority whose consciousness may be described as being, at this time, ‘sub-political’ – made up of superstition or passive irreligion, prejudice and patriotism.
The inarticulate, by definition, leave few records of their thoughts. We catch glimpses in moments of crisis, like the Gordon Riots, and yet crisis is not a typical condition. It is tempting to follow them into the archives of crime. But before we do this we must warn against the assumption that in the late eighteenth century ‘Christ’s poor’ can be divided between penitent sinners on the one hand, and murderers, thieves and drunkards on the other.
It is easy to make a false division of the people into the organized or chapel-going good and the dissolute bad in the Industrial Revolution, since the sources push us towards this conclusion from at least four directions. Such facts as are available were often presented in sensational form, and marshalled for pejorative purposes. If we are to credit one of the most industrious investigators, Patrick Colquhoun, there were, at the turn of the century, 50,000 harlots, more than 5,000 publicans, and 10,000 thieves in the metropolis alone; his more extended estimates of criminal classes, taking in receivers of stolen property, coiners, gamblers, lottery agents, cheating shopkeepers, riverside scroungers, and colourful characters like Mudlarks, Scufflehunters, Bludgeon Men, Morocco Men, Flash Coachmen, Grubbers, Bear Baiters and Strolling Minstrels totals (with the former groups) 115,000 out of a metropolitan population of less than one million. His estimate of the same classes, for the whole country, – and including one million in receipt of parish relief – totals 1,320,716. But these estimates lump together indiscriminately gipsies, vagrants, unemployed, and pedlars and the grandparents of Mayhew’s street-sellers; while his prostitutes turn out, on closer inspection to be ‘lewd and immoral women’, including ‘the prodigious number among the lower classes who cohabit together without marriage’ (and this at a time when divorce for the poor was an absolute impossibility).1
The figures then are impressionistic estimates. They reveal as much about the mentality of the propertied classes (who assumed – not without reason – that any person out of steady employment and without property must maintain himself by illicit means) as they do about the actual criminal behaviour of the unpropertied. And the date of Colquhoun’s investigations is as relevant as his conclusions; for they were conducted in the atmosphere of panic in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the two decades before this there was an important access of humanitarian concern amongst the upper classes; we can see this in the work of Howard, Hanway, Clarkson, Sir Frederick Eden, and in the growing concern for civil and religious liberties among the small gentry and the Dissenting tradesmen. But ‘the awakening of the labouring classes, after the first shocks of the French Revolution, made the upper classes tremble’, Frances, Lady Shelley, noted in her Diary: ‘Every man felt the necessity for putting his house in order…’2
To be more accurate, most men and women of property felt the necessity for putting the houses of the poor in order. The remedies proposed might differ; but the impulse behind Colquhoun, with his advocacy of more effective police, Hannah More, with her halfpenny tracts and Sunday Schools, the Methodists with their renewed emphasis upon order and submissiveness, Bishop Barrington’s more humane Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor, and William Wilberforce and Dr John Bowdler, with their Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion, was much the same. The message to be given to the labouring poor was simple, and was summarized by Burke in the famine year of 1795: ‘Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality and religion, should be recommended to them; all the rest is downright fraud.’ ‘I know nothing better calculated to fill a country with barbarians ready for any mischief,’ wrote Arthur Young, the agricultural propagandist, ‘than extensive commons and divine service only once a month…. Do French principles make so slow a progress, that you should lend them such helping hands?’1 The sensibility of the Victorian middle class was nurtured in the 1790s by frightened gentry who had seen miners, potters and cutlers reading Rights of Man, and its foster-parents were William Wilberforce and Hannah More. It was in these counter-revolutionary decades that the humanitarian tradition became warped beyond recognition. The abuses which Howard had exposed in the prisons in the 1770s and 1780s crept back in the 1790s and 1800s; and Sir Samuel Romilly, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, found that his efforts to reform the criminal law were met with hostility and timidity; the French Revolution had produced (he recalled) ‘among the higher orders… a horror of every kind of innovation’. ‘Everything rung and was connected with the Revolution in France,’ recalled Lord Cockburn (of his Scottish youth): ‘Everything, not this thing or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event.’ It was the pall of moral equivocation which settled upon Britain in these years which stung Blake to fury:
Because of the Oppressors of Albion in every City and Village…
They compell the Poor to live upon a crust of bread by soft mild arts:
They reduce the Man to want, then give with pomp and ceremony:
The praise of Jehovah is chaunted from lips of hunger and thirst.2
Such a disposition on the part of the propertied classes was not (as we have seen in the case of Colquhoun) conducive to accurate social observation. And it reinforced the natural tendency of authority to regard taverns, fairs, any large congregations of people, as a nuisance – sources of idleness, brawls, sedition or contagion. And this general disposition, at the end of the eighteenth century, to ‘fudge’ the evidence was abetted from three other directions. First, we have the utilitarian attitudes of the new manufacturing class, whose need to impose a work discipline in the factory towns made it hostile to many traditional amusements and levities. Second, there is the Methodist pressure itself, with its unending procession of breast-beating sinners, pouring confessional biographies from the press. ‘Almighty Father, why didst thou bear with such a rebel?’ asks one such penitent, a redeemed sailor. In his dissolute youth he –
went to horse-races, wakes, dances, fairs, attended the play-house, nay, so far had he forsaken the fear of his Maker and the counsel of his mother, that he several times got intoxicated with liquor. He was an adept in singing profane songs, cracking jokes, and making risible and ludicrous remarks…
As for the common sailor –
His song, his bumper and his sweetheart (perhaps a street-pacing harlot) form his trio of pleasure. He rarely thinks, seldom reads, and never prays…. Speak to him about the call of God, he tells you he hears enough of the boatswain’s call…. If you talk of Heaven, he hopes he shall get a good berth aloft: is hell mentioned? he jokes about being put under the hatchway.
‘O my children, what a miracle that such a victim of sin should become a preacher of salvation!’1
Such literature as this must be held up to a Satanic light and read backwards if we are to perceive what the ‘Jolly Tar’ or the apprentice or the Sandgate lass thought about Authority or Methodist preachers. If this is not done, the historian may be led to judge the eighteenth century most harshly for some of the things which made life endurable for the common people. And, when we come to assess the early working-class movement, this kind of evidence is supplemented from a third direction. Some of the first leaders and chroniclers of the movement were self-educated working men, who raised themselves by efforts of self-discipline which required them to turn their backs upon the happy-go-lucky tavern world. ‘I cannot, like many other men, go to a tavern,’ wrote Francis Place: ‘I hate taverns and tavern company. I cannot drink, I cannot for any considerable time consent to converse with fools.’1 The self-respecting virtues often carried with them corresponding narrowing attitudes – in Place’s case leading him on to the acceptance of Utilitarian and Malthusian doctrines. And since Place was the greatest archivist of the early movement, his own abhorrence of the improvidence, ignorance, and licentiousness of the poor is bound to colour the record. Moreover, the struggle of the reformers was one for enlightenment, order, sobriety, in their own ranks; so much so that Windham, in 1802, was able to declare with some colour that the Methodists and the Jacobins were leagued together to destroy the amusements of the people:
By the former… everything joyous was to be prohibited, to prepare the people for the reception of their fanatical doctrines. By the Jacobins, on the other hand, it was an object of important consideration to give to the disposition of the lower orders a character of greater seriousness and gravity, as the means of facilitating the reception of their tenets.2
Those who have wished to emphasise the sober constitutional ancestry of the working-class movement have sometimes minimized its more robust and rowdy features. All that we can do is bear the warning in mind. We need more studies of the social attitudes of criminals, of soldiers and sailors, of tavern life; and we should look at the evidence, not with a moralizing eye (‘Christ’s poor’ were not always pretty), but with an eye for Brechtian values – the fatalism, the irony in the face of Establishment homilies, the tenacity of self-preservation. And we must also remember the ‘underground’ of the ballad-singer and the fair-ground which handed on traditions to the nineteenth century (to the music-hall, or Dickens’ circus folk, or Hardy’s pedlars and showmen); for in these ways the ‘inarticulate’ conserved certain values – a spontaneity and capacity for enjoyment and mutual loyalties – despite the inhibiting pressures of magistrates, mill-owners, and Methodists.
We may isolate two ways in which these ‘sub-political’ traditions affect the early working-class movement; the phenomena of riot and of the mob, and the popular notions of an Englishman’s ‘birthright’. For the first, we must realize that there have always persisted popular attitudes towards crime, amounting at times to an unwritten code, quite distinct from the laws of the land. Certain crimes were outlawed by both codes: a wife or child murderer would be pelted and execrated on the way to Tyburn. Highwaymen and pirates belonged to popular ballads, part heroic myth, part admonition to the young. But other crimes were actively condoned by whole communities – coining, poaching, the evasion of taxes (the window tax and tithes) or excise or the press-gang. Smuggling communities lived in a state of constant war with authority, whose unwritten rules were understood by both sides; the authorities might seize a ship or raid the village, and the smugglers might resist arrest – ‘but it was no part of the smuggling tactics to carry war farther than defence, or at times a rescue, because of the retaliatory measures that were sure to come…’1 On the other hand, other crimes, which were easily committed and yet which struck at the livelihood of particular communities – sheep-stealing or stealing cloth off the tenters in the open field – excited popular condemnation.2
This distinction between the legal code and the unwritten popular code is a commonplace at any time. But rarely have the two codes been more sharply distinguished from each other than in the second half of the eighteenth century. One may even see these years as ones in which the class war is fought out in terms of Tyburn, the hulks and the Bridewells on the one hand; and crime, riot, and mob action on the other. Professor Radzinowicz’s researches into the History of English Criminal Law have added a depressing weight of evidence to the picture long made familiar by Goldsmith:
Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw,
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law….
It was not (an important reservation) the judge but the legislature which was responsible for enacting ever more capital punishments for crimes against property: in the years between the Restoration and the death of George III the number of capital offences was increased by about 190 – or more than one for every year: no less than sixty-three of these were added in the years 1760–1810. Not only petty theft, but primitive forms of industrial rebellion – destroying a silk loom, throwing down fences when commons were enclosed, and firing corn ricks – were to be punished by death. It is true that the police force was totally inadequate and the administration of ‘justice’ haphazard. It is true also that in the latter years of the eighteenth century, while capital offences multiplied, some juries became reluctant to convict, and the proportion of convicted offenders who were actually brought to execution fell.1 But the death sentence, if respited, was generally exchanged to the terrible living death of the hulks or to transportation. The procession to Tyburn (later, the scaffold outside Newgate) was a central ceremonial of eighteenth-century London. The condemned in the carts – the men in gaudy attire, the women in white, with baskets of flowers and oranges which they threw to the crowds – the ballad-singers and hawkers, with their ‘last speeches’ (which were sold even before the victims had given the sign of the dropped handkerchief to the hangman to do his work): all the symbolism of ‘Tyburn Fair’ was a ritual at the heart of London’s popular culture.
The commercial expansion, the enclosure movement, the early years of the Industrial Revolution – all took place within the shadow of the gallows. The white slaves left our shores for the American plantations and later for Van Diemen’s Land, while Bristol and Liverpool were enriched with the profits of black slavery; and slave-owners from West Indian plantations grafted their wealth to ancient pedigrees at the marriage-market in Bath. It is not a pleasant picture. In the lower depths, police officers and gaolers grazed on the pastures of crime – blood-money, garnish money, and sales of alcohol to their victims. The system of graduated rewards for thief-takers incited them to magnify the offence of the accused. The poor lost their rights in the land and were tempted to crime by their poverty and by the inadequate measures of prevention; the small tradesman or master was tempted to forgery or illicit transactions by fear of the debtor’s prison. Where no crime could be proved, the J.P.s had wide powers to consign the vagabond or sturdy rogue or unmarried mother to the Bridewell (or ‘House of Correction’) – those evil, disease-ridden places, managed by corrupt officers, whose conditions shocked John Howard more than the worst prisons. The greatest offence against property was to have none.
The law was hated, but it was also despised. Only the most hardened criminal was held in as much popular odium as the informer who brought men to the gallows. And the resistance movement to the laws of the propertied took not only the form of individualistic criminal acts, but also that of piecemeal and sporadic insurrectionary actions where numbers gave some immunity. When Wyvill warned Major Cartwright of the ‘wild work’ of the ‘lawless and furious rabble’ he was not raising imaginary objections. The British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century are punctuated by riot, occasioned by bread prices, turnpikes and tolls, excise, ‘rescue’, strikes, new machinery, enclosures, press-gangs and a score of other grievances. Direct action on particular grievances merges on one hand into the great political risings of the ‘mob’ – the Wilkes agitation of the 1760s and 1770s, the Gordon Riots (1780), the mobbing of the King in the London streets (1795 and 1820), the Bristol Riots (1831) and the Birmingham Bull Ring riots (1839). On the other hand it merges with organized forms of sustained illegal action or quasi-insurrection – Luddism (1811–13), the East Anglian Riots (1816), the ‘Last Labourer’s Revolt’ (1830), the Rebecca Riots (1839 and 1842) and the Plug Riots (1842).
This second, quasi-insurrectionary, form we shall look at more closely when we come to consider Luddism. It was a form of direct action which arose in specific conditions, which was often highly organized and under the protection of the local community, and as to which we should be chary of generalization. The first form is only now beginning to receive the attention of historians. Dr Rudé, in his study of The Crowd in the French Revolution, suggests that ‘the term “mobs”, in the sense of hired bands operating on behalf of external interests… should be invoked with discretion and only when justified by the particular occasion’. Too often historians have used the term lazily, to evade further analysis, or (with the suggestion of criminal elements motivated by the desire for loot) as a gesture of prejudice. And Dr Rudé suggests that the term ‘revolutionary crowd’ may be more useful when discussing riot in late eighteenth-century England as well as in revolutionary France.
The distinction is useful. In eighteenth-century Britain riotous actions assumed two different forms: that of more or less spontaneous popular direct action; and that of the deliberate use of the crowd as an instrument of pressure, by persons ‘above’ or apart from the crowd. The first form has not received the attention which it merits. It rested upon more articulate popular sanctions and was validated by more sophisticated traditions than the word ‘riot’ suggests. The most common example is the bread or food riot, repeated cases of which can be found in almost every town and county until the 1840s.1 This was rarely a mere uproar which culminated in the breaking open of barns or the looting of shops. It was legitimized by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people.
In urban and rural communities alike, a consumer-consciousness preceded other forms of political or industrial antagonism. Not wages, but the cost of bread, was the most sensitive indicator of popular discontent. Artisans, self-employed craftsmen, or such groups as the Cornish tin miners (where the traditions of the ‘free’ miner coloured responses until the nineteenth century),1 saw their wages as regulated by custom or by their own bargaining. They expected to buy their provisions in the open market, and even in times of shortage they expected prices to be regulated by custom also. (The God-provided ‘laws’ of supply and demand, whereby scarcity inevitably led to soaring prices, had by no means won acceptance in the popular mind, where older notions of face-to-face bargaining still persisted.) Any sharp rise in prices precipitated riot. An intricate tissue of legislation and of custom regulated the ‘Assize of Bread’, the size and quality of the loaf.2 Even the attempt to impose the standard Winchester measure for the sale of wheat, in the face of some customary measure, could ensue in riots. When the North Devon Agricultural Society imposed the standard Winchester bushel in Bideford market in 1812, one of its leading members was the recipient of a blood-chilling letter:
… Winter Nights is not past therefore your person shall not go home alive – or if you chance to escape the hand that guides this pen, a lighted Match will do eaqual execution. Your family I know not But the whole shall be inveloped in flames, your Carkase if any such should be found will be given to the Dogs if it Contains any Moisture for the Annimals to devour it…3
Food riots were sometimes uproarious, like the ‘Great Cheese Riot’ at Nottingham’s Goose Fair in 1764, when whole cheeses were rolled down the streets; or the riot in the same city, in 1788, caused by the high price of meat, when the doors and shutters of the shambles were torn down and burned, together with the butcher’s books, in the market-place.1 But even this violence shows a motive more complex than hunger: retailers were being punished, on account of their prices and the poor quality of the meat. More often the ‘mobs’ showed self-discipline, within a customary pattern of behaviour. Perhaps the only occasion in his life when John Wesley commended a disorderly action was when he noted in his journal the actions of a mob in James’ Town, Ireland; the mob –
had been in motion all the day; but their business was only with the forestallers of the market, who had bought up all the corn far and near, to starve the poor, and load a Dutch ship, which lay at the quay; but the mob brought it all out into the market, and sold it for the owners at the common price. And this they did with all the calmness and composure imaginable, and without striking or hurting anyone.
In Honiton in 1766 lace-workers seized corn on the premises of the farmers, took it to market themselves, sold it, and returned the money and even the sacks back to the farmers.2 In the Thames Valley in the same year the villages and towns (Abingdon, Newbury, Maidstone) were visited by large parties of labourers, who styled themselves ‘the Regulators’, enforcing a popular price on all provisions. (The action commenced with gangs of men working on the turnpike road, who said ‘with one Voice, Come one & all to Newbury in a Body to Make the Bread cheaper’.)3 A Halifax example of 1783 repeats the same pattern of mass intimidation and self-discipline. The crowd was gathered from weaving villages outside the town, and descended upon the market-place in some sort of order (formed into ‘twos’) with an ex-soldier and coiner, Thomas Spencer, at their head. The corn merchants were besieged, and forced to sell oats at 30s. and wheat at 21s. a load. When Spencer and a fellow rioter were subsequently executed, a strong force of military was brought out in expectation of a rescue attempt; and the funeral cart went up the Calder Valley to Spencer’s home village on a road thronged for several miles with mourners. 1
Such ‘riots’ were popularly regarded as acts of justice, and their leaders held as heroes. In most cases they culminated in the enforced sale of provisions at the customary or popular price, analogous to the French ‘taxation populaire’,2 the proceeds being given to the owners. Moreover, they required more preparation and organization than is at first apparent; sometimes the ‘mob’ controlled the market-place for several days, waiting for prices to come down; sometimes actions were preceded by hand-written (and, in the 1790s, printed) handbills; sometimes the women controlled the market-place, while parties of men intercepted grain on the roads, at the docks, on the rivers; very often the signal for the action was given by a man or woman carrying a loaf aloft, decorated with black ribbon, and inscribed with some slogan. A Nottingham action in September 1812 commenced with several women,
sticking a half penny loaf on the top of a fishing rod, after having streaked it with red ochre, and tied around it a shred of black crape, emblematic… of ‘bleeding famine decked in Sackecloth’.3
The climactic year for such ‘riots’ was 1795, a year of European famine or extreme scarcity, when the older popular tradition was stiffened by the Jacobin consciousness of a minority. As prices soared, direct action spread throughout the country. In Nottingham women ‘went from one baker’s shop to another, set their own price on the stock therein, and putting down the money, took it away’. The Mayor of Gloucester wrote anxiously:
I have great reason to be apprehensive of a visit from the Colliers in the Forest of Dean, who have for some days been going round to the Townes in their Neighbourhood, & selling the Flour, Wheat, & Bread belonging to the Millers & Bakers, at a reduced price.
In Newcastle the crowd enforced the sale of butter at 8d. a lb., wheat at 12s. per boll, and potatoes at 5s. a load, in the presence of the town’s officers: no violence was committed. At Wisbech the ‘Bankers’ (‘a most Outrageous Set of Men, whose numbers make them formidable’) – gangs of rural workers engaged in ditching, enclosure work, etc. – led a riot in the market headed by a man with a sixpenny loaf on a pitch-fork. At Carlisle grain hidden in a warehouse was located, and its contents, as well as the cargo of a ship, were brought to the Town Hall and sold at 18s. a load. In Cornwall the ‘tinners’ swarmed into the farmlands, enforcing their ‘Laws of the Maximum’.1
Actions on such a scale (and there were many others) indicate an extraordinarily deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief. Moreover, they were so extensive that the Privy Council (which was largely concerned with the problem of grain supplies from May to December 1795) could scarcely ensure the transport of supplies from one county to the next. Something in the nature of a war between the countryside and the towns grew up. The people of the rural districts believed that their corn would be sent to the cities, while they would be left to starve. The farmers refused to send grain to market, for fear it would be sold at the popular price. In the ports grain-ships were stopped, since the people believed that factors were sending it abroad. Magistrates connived at the retaining of corn in their own districts. At Witney ‘the Inhabitants… seized some Grain as it was going to be sent out of the Country, brought it back, and sold it at a low price’. Loads of wheat were stopped in Cambridge, and sold off in the market-place. In the West Riding, barges on the Calder and Aire were stopped and impounded by mobs. At Burford the people prevented a load of corn from being sent out of the town, and sold it at 8s. a bushel; a magistrate feared that the people of Birmingham might sally out and attack Burford. At Wells ‘a great many Women’ prevented grain ships from sailing to London.1
These popular actions were legitimized by the old paternalist moral economy. Although the old legislation against forestallers and regraters had been largely repealed or abrogated by the end of the eighteenth century, it endured with undiminished vigour, both in popular tradition and in the minds of some Tory paternalists, including no less a person than the Lord Chief Justice (Kenyon), who made known his view, in 1795, that forestalling and engrossing remained offences at common law.2 In the popular mind, these offences encompassed any exploitive action calculated to raise the price of provisions, and in particular the activities of factors, millers, bakers, and all middlemen. ‘Those Cruall Villions the Millers Bakers etc Flower Sellers rases Flowe under a Comebination to what price they please on purpose to make an Artificall Famine in a Land of plenty’ – so runs a handbill of 1795, from Retford. ‘The corn factors and the sort of peopul which we call huckstors and mealmen which have got the corn in to there hands and thay hold it up and Sell it to the poor at thare owne price’ – so runs a petition from some labourers in Leeds.3 The great millers were believed to corner the grain in order to enhance its price; in Birmingham a large flour mill, powered by steam, at Snow Hill was attacked in 1795; while London’s great Albion Flour Mills burned down on two occasions. On the first occasion, arson was rumoured, since the Mills were believed to practise forms of adulteration; the people were ‘willing spectators’, and ‘ballads of rejoicing were printed and sung on the spot’. On the second occasion (1811), ‘the populace rejoiced at the conflagration’.4
Hence the final years of the eighteenth century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market. In this they received some support from old-fashioned J.P.s, who threatened to prosecute forestallers, tightened controls over markets, or issued proclamations against engrossers who brought up growing corn in the fields.1 The Speenhamland decision of 1795, to subsidize wages in relation to the price of bread, must be seen as arising out of this background; where the custom of the market-place was in dissolution, paternalists attempted to evoke it in the scale of relief. But the old customary notions died hard. There was a scatter of prosecutions for forestalling between 1795 and 1800; in 1800 a number of private prosecuting societies were formed, which offered rewards for convictions; and an important conviction for forestalling was upheld in the High Courts, to the evident satisfaction of Lord Kenyon.2 But this was the last attempt to enforce the old paternalist consumer-protection. Thereafter the total breakdown of customary controls contributed much to popular bitterness against a Parliament of protectionist landlords and laissez faire commercial magnates.
In considering only this one form of ‘mob’ action we have come upon unsuspected complexities, for behind every such form of popular direct action some legitimizing notion of right is to be found. On the other hand, the employment of the ‘mob’ in a sense much closer to Dr Rudé’s definition (‘hired bands operating on behalf of external interests’) was an established technique in the eighteenth century; and – what is less often noted – it had long been employed by authority itself. The 1688 settlement was, after all, a compromise; and it was convenient for the beneficiaries to seek to confirm their position by encouraging popular antipathy towards Papists (potential Jacobites) on the one hand, and Dissenters (potential Levellers) on the other. A mob was a very useful supplement to the magistrates in a nation that was scarcely policed. John Wesley, in his early years, and his first field-preachers, often encountered these mobs who acted under a magistrate’s licence. One of the most violent encounters was at Wednesbury and Walsall in 1743. By Wesley’s account the mob was highly volatile and confused as to its own intentions. The ‘captains of the rabble’ were the ‘heroes of the town’: but the only ones identified are an ‘honest butcher’ and a ‘prize-fighter at the bear-garden’ who both suddenly changed sides and took Wesley’s part. The matter becomes more clear when we learn that the mob was backed by the local magistrates, and by a local vicar, who was outraged by Wesley’s local preachers (‘a Bricklayer, and then a Plumber-Glazier’) who had ‘alienated the Affections’ of Colliers from the Church, and called the clergy ‘dumb Dogs’. Indeed, by Wesley’s account, ‘some of the gentlemen… threatened to turn away collier or miner out of their service that did not come and do his part’.1 John Nelson’s Journal gives us an example from Grimsby where it was the minister of the Church of England who –
got a man to beat the town drum through the town, and went before the drum, and gathered all the rabble he could, giving them liquor to go with him to fight for the Church.
At the door of the house where Nelson was preaching it was the parson who cried out to the mob, ‘Pull down the house! Pull down the house!’
But of greater importance than these provincial manifestations of popular feeling upon particular issues was the London mob, whose presence is continually felt in the political history of the eighteenth century and which Wilkes removed altogether from the control of the agents of authority in the 1760s. In a sense, this was a transitional mob, on its way to becoming a self-conscious Radical crowd; the leaven of Dissent and of political education was at work, giving to the people a predisposition to turn out in defence of popular liberties, in defiance of authority, and in ‘movements of social protest, in which the underlying conflict of poor against rich… is clearly visible…’1 The Spitalfields silk-weavers and their apprentices had long been noted for their anti-authoritarian turbulence; Dr Rudé, in his study of Wilkes and Liberty, notes occasions where industrial conflict slips over into Wilkite demonstration, and where the slogans of the crowd took a republican or revolutionary turn: ‘Damn the King, damn the Government, damn the Justices!’, ‘This is the most glorious opportunity for a Revolution that ever offered!’ For nearly a decade London and the south seemed (in the words of one critic) to be ‘a great Bedlam under the dominion of a beggarly, idle and intoxicated mob without keepers, actuated solely by the word Wilkes…’2 These were the supporters who:
demonstrated in St George’s Fields, at Hyde Park Corner, at the Mansion House, in Parliament Square and St James’s Palace; who shouted, or chalked up, ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ in the streets of the City, Westminster and Southwark; who pelted Sheriff Harley and the common hangman at the Royal Exchange when they attempted to burn No. 45 of The North Briton; who smashed the windows of Lords Bute and Egremont and daubed the boots of the Austrian Ambassador; who paraded the Boot and Petticoat in the City streets, and burned Colonel Luttrell and Lords Sandwich and Barrington in effigy outside the Tower of London. These are the elements whom contemporaries and later historians have – either from indolence, prejudice or lack of more certain knowledge – called ‘the mob’…3
They were also the people – tradesmen, servants, coal-heavers, sailors, artisans and wage-earners of all descriptions – who demonstrated for Wilkes on the hustings and who dragged him in triumph through the streets whenever he was victorious.
Dr Rudé is right to rescue the London crowd from the imputation of being mere hooligans and ‘criminal elements’; and the distinction which he draws between the hired ruffians brought in to support the anti-Wilkite candidate, Proctor, and the spontaneous ebullience of the Wilkite majority is significant. However, in protesting against the ‘prejudice’ of historians, he protests too much. For the London crowd of the 1760s and 1770s had scarcely begun to develop its own organization or leaders; had little theory distinct from that of its ‘managers’; and there is a sense in which it was manipulated and called out by Wilkes to ‘operate on behalf of external interests’ – the interests of the wealthy tradesmen, merchants, and manufacturers of the City who were Wilkes’s most influential supporters. Wilkes himself affected a cynical contempt for the huzzas of his own plebeian following: ‘Do you suppose,’ it is said that he asked his opponent, Colonel Luttrell, while watching the cheering throngs on the hustings, ‘that there are more fools or rogues in that assembly?’ And the anomaly between the libertarian aspirations of the crowd and the mob-technique of its management, is further emphasized when we recall that the Wilkite merchants and tradesmen captured key posts in the government of the City, so that the Londoners who mobbed the carriages and broke the windows of the Great knew – no less than the Walsall miners – that they were acting under licence. The Wilkite crowd was in fact at a half-way house in the emergence of popular political consciousness; while its most popular slogan was ‘Liberty!’ many of its members were highly volatile and might equally well swing round to attack ‘alien’ elements or smash the windows of citizens who failed to illuminate them on ‘patriotic’ occasions.1
This is most clearly revealed in the Gordon Riots of 1780. Here we see a popular agitation which passed swiftly through three phases. In the first phase the ‘revolutionary crowd’, well organized by the popular Protestant Association, marched in fair order behind great banners to present a petition against Catholic toleration to the Houses of Parliament. Those foremost in the demonstration were ‘the better sort of tradesmen… well-dressed, decent sort of people… exceeding quiet and orderly and very civil’. This was Dissenting London, and among them Gibbon described some fanatical ‘Puritans’, ‘such as they might be in the time of Cromwell… started out from their graves’. The refusal of the House of Commons to debate the petition – and Lord George Gordon’s harangues – led on to angry scenes which introduced the second phase. This phase may be described as one of licensed spontaneity, leading on to mob violence informed by ‘a groping desire to settle accounts with the rich, if only for a day’; some of the ‘better sort of tradesmen’ faded away, while journeymen, apprentices, and servants – and some criminals – thronged the streets.1 The cry ‘No Popery’ had reverberated in the popular consciousness since the Commonwealth and 1688; and no doubt swept in many whose sub-political responses were described by Defoe many years before – ‘stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’. The riots were directed in the first place against Catholic chapels and the houses of wealthy Catholics, then against prominent personalities in authority – including Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and the Archbishop of York – who were believed to sympathize with Catholic emancipation, then against the prisons – whose inmates were released – and finally culminated in an attack on the Bank itself. Throughout this second phase, the sense of a ‘licensed’ mob continued: the Wilkite city authorities were conspicuous by their inactivity or absence, in part through fear of incurring popular odium, in part through actual connivance at disorders which strengthened their hands against the King and his Government. It was only when the third phase commenced – the attack on the Bank on one hand, and indiscriminate orgies of drunkenness, arson, and pickpocketing on the other – that the ‘licence’ was withdrawn: the inactive Lord Mayor at last sent a desperate message to the Commander-in-Chief calling for ‘Horse and Foot to assist the civil power’ and Alderman Wilkes himself went out to repel the mob on the steps of the Bank. The rapidity with which the riots were quelled emphasizes the previous inactivity of the City authorities.
We have here, then, something of a mixture of manipulated mob and revolutionary crowd. Lord George Gordon had tried to emulate Wilkes, but he had nothing of Wilkes’s well-judged audacity and splendid sense of the popular mood. He released a spontaneous process of riot, which yet was under the immunity of the Wilkite City fathers. Groups of rioters threw up their own temporary leaders, reminiscent of Thomas Spencer the Halifax coiner – James Jackson, a watch-wheelcutter, who rode a carthorse and waved a red and black flag, and Enoch Foster, a circus strong man, who amused the mob by hurling floorboards through the windows of a Whitechapel house. But this kind of mixture is never seen in the metropolis again. In 1780 the London people, despite their excesses, were under the protection of the libertarian Whigs, who saw them as a counterweight to the pretensions of the Throne: Burke deplored the use of the military in subduing the riots, while Fox declared that he would ‘much rather be governed by a mob than a standing army’. But after the French Revolution no Whig politician would have risked, no City father condoned, the tampering with such dangerous energies; while the reformers, for their part, worked to create an organized public opinion, and despised the technique of unleashing the mob. ‘Mobility’ was a term proudly adopted by nineteenth-century Radicals and Chartists for their peaceable and well-conducted demonstrations.
The last great action of an eighteenth-century mob was at Birmingham in 1791, in a form which should make us especially chary as to generalizations about the ‘revolutionary crowd’.1 Birmingham was perhaps the greatest centre of middle-class Dissent; its Old and New Unitarian Meetings included some of the largest employers in the district; Dissenters played so large a part in the economic, intellectual, and corporate life of the city that the ‘Church and King’ party had long felt the bitterness which came, not from strength, but from waning power and prestige. The ostensible occasion for the riots was a dinner held by middle-class reformers (many of them Dissenters) on 14 July 1791, to celebrate the fall of the Bastille. That night and for the next three days the ‘bunting, beggarly, brass-making, brazen-faced, brazen-hearted, blackguard, bustling, booby Birmingham mob’ ran amuck in the city and its environs, sacking two Unitarian and one Baptist meeting-house, burning or looting a score of houses and many shops of wealthy Dissenters (or supposed sympathizers), and releasing prisoners from the Town Prison. While Dissenters were the chief victims (especially those associated with the cause of reform) ‘it was not always clear’ (Mr Rose comments), ‘whether rich dissenters were attacked because they were dissenters or because they were rich’. The cries of their assailants ranged from ‘Church and King!’ to ‘No Popery!’
As to the authenticity of popular resentment against some of the wealthy Dissenters there can be no doubt. (For example, one of the victims, William Hutton, had earned particular unpopularity in his office as a commissioner for the Birmingham Court of Requests, a court for the enforcement of the payment of small debts.) But there are a number of peculiarly suspicious circumstances in the Birmingham riots which recall John Wesley’s treatment nearly fifty years previously at the hands of the Walsall mobs. First, there is the undoubted complicity of several prominent Tory magistrates and clergy, who encouraged the rioters at their commencement, directed them to the meeting-houses, intervened only half-heartedly, refused to prosecute offenders, and may even have indicated ‘legitimate’ targets for mob violence. Second, there is the small number of effective rioters in the important actions. Apart from miners and others from surrounding villages who joined in the week-end looting, the marauding mob was rarely estimated at above 250, while repeated accounts speak of a hard core of about thirty incendiaries who did most of the serious damage. Third, there is the evidence that this hard core (which may not even have been composed of local men) worked to a definite plan of campaign and was exceptionally well-briefed as to the religious and political affiliations of prominent Birmingham citizens. The riots may have been motivated – as Priestley charged – by ‘religious bigotry’, and the Bastille Day celebrations certainly served as their pretext. But it was a discriminatory outburst, under the licence of a part of the local Establishment, and it should be regarded ‘as an episode in which the “country gentlemen” called out the urban mob to draw the dissenting teeth of the aggressive and successful Birmingham bourgeoisie’. At the same time, it was ‘an explosion of latent class hatred and personal lawlessness triggered-off by the fortuitous coming together of old religious animosities and new social and political grievances’,1 in which the actions of the mob went beyond the limits anticipated at their permissive origin.
But it is a serious error to generalize from the Birmingham riots as to the general hostility of the urban poor to French Revolutionary or ‘Jacobin’ ideas. As we shall see, the welcome to the first stages of the French Revolution came largely from middle-class and Dissenting groups. It was not until 1792 that these ideas gained a wide popular following, mainly through the agency of Paine’s Rights of Man. Thus the Priestley riots can be seen as a late backward eddy of the transitional mob, before the Painite propaganda had started in earnest the formation of a new democratic consciousness. Riots, of course, continued for many years after 1792: either upon specific issues – Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical commences with a roll-call of the riots, at Bridport, Bideford, Bury, Newcastle, Glasgow, Ely, Preston, Nottingham, Merthyr, Birmingham, Walsall, at the close of the Napoleonic Wars – or (notably at Bristol, Merthyr, Nottingham and Derby in 1831 and at Birmingham in 1839) as insurrectionary climaxes to Radical agitation. In the Bristol riots we meet again some of the features of the Gordon and Priestley Riots: the sack of the Bishop’s Palace and the Mansion House, the release of prisoners from the gaols, the looting and burning of unpopular citizens’ houses and shops. But the authorities could find no conspiracy behind the rioters – at the most an excited free-thinking tradesman, Charles Davis, who went about waving his hat on the end of his umbrella, shouting ‘Down with the churches and mend the roads with them!’, and who was hanged for his pains.1 The riots took place, not under the slogan of ‘Church and King!’ but of ‘King and Reform!’ and the King was only coupled with the latter cry because it was believed that he favoured a Reform Ministry. It was not the Dissenters but leading Churchmen (many of whom were West India slave-holders) who were the main target. At the same time, the democratic sentiments informing the rioters should not mislead us into mistaking the Bristol Riots for a politically conscious revolutionary action. Bristol in 1831 exemplifies the persistence of older, backward-looking patterns of behaviour, just as much as Manchester in 1819 exemplifies the emergence of the self-disciplined patterns of the new working-class movement. Ignorance and superstition had been jerked from loyalist into Radical courses; but we get a whiff of the Gordon and Priestley Riots in the words of the Bristol rioter who threw an armful of manuscripts and books from the Cathedral Chapter Library into the fire-declaring ‘there could be no reform without books were burnt’.2
The true mobs, in the sense of ‘hired bands operating on behalf of external interests’, are the ‘Church and King’ mobs employed from 1792 onwards to terrorize the English Jacobins.1 While these mobs were sometimes directed against wealthy and prominent reformers – as in the case of Thomas Walker of Manchester – they belong to the tradition of the Walsall mine-owners and the Grimsby Parson, and were so highly organized by – and sometimes paid by – ‘external interests’ that it is difficult to take them as indicative of any authentic independent popular sentiment. Moreover, despite the complete licence offered in many places by clergy and J.Ps to anti-Jacobin mobs they rarely involved more than a small group of picked hooligans, and they never sparked off popular violence on the scale of Birmingham in 1791. There were important urban centres – notably Sheffield and Norwich – where the ‘Church and King’ mob acted with very limited success. Nor was it possible to employ these mobs on any scale in London. The acquittal of the Jacobin prisoners in 1794 was the signal for popular triumph on the scale of the Wilkite celebrations. In 1795 the London crowd was revolutionary in mood and (through the London Corresponding Society) was discovering new forms of organization and leadership. Perhaps the crucial encounter was in October 1797, at the height of anti-Jacobin repression, when there was an inspired attempt to destroy Thomas Hardy’s premises when he refused to illuminate on the occasion of a naval victory. The attack was beaten off by a guard of 100 members of the L.C.S., ‘many of them Irish, armed with good shillelahs’. It was an historic victory: as one of the ‘guard’ recalled, ‘I never was in so long-continued and well-conducted a fight as was that night made by those who defended Hardy’s house.’ When Hardy looked back on the incident his own feelings were decided: ‘I do not relish the government of a mob.’2 And we may see in the events of four years later an ironic sequel. In 1801 London was once again illuminated, but this time it was in honour of the preliminaries of peace which had been signed between Britain and France. This time the mob vented its feelings by breaking every window in the house of a bellicose anti-Jacobin journalist, who refused to illuminate for the peace. There was no popular guard and even the City authorities were tardy in sending protection. The journalist was William Cobbett.1