Popular Disturbances in England 1700-1832

John Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138155626
• eBook ISBN: 9781317897132
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

John Stevenson has revised and expanded his standard but long-unobtainable work on Popular Protest and Public Order 1700-1870 in two self-sufficient volumes. The first (1700-1832) appeared in 1992; this is its keenly-awaited sequel. The greater part of it is entirely new, and brings the analysis of popular disturbance -- and its political and economic roots -- through to modern times. Tracing the theme through from the Chartists of the late 1830s to the British Union of Fascists in the late 1930s, it highlights both the changing agendas and the unchanging tensions that underlie social disorder.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315845197-1

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that a prospective research student who confessed to wanting to work in the field of popular disturbances was asked by a famous constitutional historian ‘Why are you interested in these bandits?’ It is a question unlikely to be framed in quite the same way today; perhaps not even asked at all. Few areas of social history have attracted more attention in recent years than the study of popular movements. It may be an exaggeration to suggest that interest in ‘the deserter, the mutineer, the primitive rebel, the rural bandit, the market rioter, the urban criminal, the pickpocket, and the village prophet’ dominates every Senior Common Room and Examination Hall, but one knows what Richard Cobb meant when he spoke of the almost ‘alarming respectability’ which the subject has attained.¹

Historians of modern Britain have always had some interest in questions of popular protest and public order if only for their bearing on the topic of the revolution manquée, why and how Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries escaped a revolutionary upheaval similar to those experienced on the continent. Riots, rebellions and industrial conflict have frequently been viewed – explicitly or implicitly – as a barometer of social and political stability. British historians have tended to regard periods of concentrated and violent protest as potentially revolutionary: R. J White, for example, regarded the period following the Napoleonic Wars as the time when the country came closest to revolution; other favoured candidates have been the Reform crisis of 1830–2 and the peak years of Chartist agitation.² There has also been a strong tradition of social and labour history which traced the sometimes violent responses to industrial and agricultural change. The Hammonds provided the first substantial accounts of the Luddite outbreaks and the disturbances in the agricultural counties in 1830–2 in their studies of the rise of industry and the impact of agricultural change.³

To some extent, however, the study of popular disturbances remained somewhat incidental to the main concerns of historians. The presence of ‘riots’ or other kinds of violence has more often been treated as the inevitable outcome of distress and the absence of an efficient police force than as a subject worthy of study in its own right.⁴ Popular disturbances have generally been seen as indicating moments of particular crisis and as evidence of a ‘primitive’ stage of social and political development which preceded the acquisition of political rights, the growth of organised trade unionism, and the gradual amelioration of social conditions. Thus R. F. Wearmouth, the historian of Methodism, produced what became a quite widely-used chronicle of riots and disturbances in eighteenth-century England to provide evidence of the brutal character of eighteenth-century society before its subsequent improvement under the influence of Methodism.⁵ This is not to belittle earlier generations of historians, simply to recognise that their interests often led them to treat popular movements of various kinds as a peripheral phenomenon, more to be regretted than examined for their own sake.

In common with many other aspects of social history, the study of popular movements, riots, and crowds received considerable impetus from the work of the Armales school and their concern with ‘total’ or at least ‘broader’ history. Some interest in crowd psychology had been shown by writers such as Gustave Le Bon at the turn of the century, but it was George Lefebvre’s study of ‘Foules revolution-naires’, published in 1934, which provided the first serious attempt to examine the role of crowds and mobs in the social and political context of the French Revolution.⁶ After the Second World War a number of historians began to give more serious attention to popular movements, including the nature and role of the ‘mob’ or ‘crowd’. Among the pioneering works in this field were E. J. Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels and G. Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution and Wilkes and Liberty. These works together with a number of articles, opened many new lines of enquiry.⁷

The work of Rudé brought the ‘mob’ within the orbit of national political events. The crowds involved in the French Revolution were shown to be something more than spasmodic and irrational phenomena and the London mob of the eighteenth century was put within the context of the ‘political nation without-doors’, which could on occasions act with other elements as an opposition to the Government of the day. Of the agitations surrounding John Wilkes and Lord George Gordon, Rudé wrote: ‘Anomic and associational movements, social protest and political demands, well-organised and clear-sighted interest groups and “direct-action” crowds, leaders and followers came together in a chorus of united opposition.’⁸ But as well as illustrating the role of popular disturbances in some of the major political upheavals of the eighteenth century, the work of Rudé and others provided a greater understanding of the composition, nature and ideology of the eighteenth-century mob. It was shown, for example, that the stereotypes commonly applied both by contemporaries and some later historians were highly misleading. Analysis of the participants in some larger disturbances in eighteenth-century London and revolutionary Paris suggested that the majority were neither criminals nor unemployed, but often a fairly typical cross-section of the working population; moreover, when examined closely, many were revealed as disciplined and highly ritualised forms of protest, in which the populace acted in accordance with a coherent set of beliefs and values. Hobsbawm showed how protest movements in pre-industrial Italy operated within a framework of traditional concepts about the ‘just King’. Studies of food riots in both England and France suggested that these too were frequently selective, disciplined and ritualised protests directed at obtaining ‘fair’ or ‘just’ prices. Similarly Hobsbawm’s study of the Luddites placed them within the context of a traditional process of ‘collective bargaining by riot’ which provided a means by which early trade groups could negotiate with their employers.⁹

Popular disturbances also provide an opportunity to investigate the ideas and beliefs of otherwise largely inarticulate sections of the population. The London mob, for example, showed a recurrent emphasis upon its ‘rights’ and ‘liberties’, intermingled with ‘No Popery’ and popular chauvinism.¹⁰ Taking some of these points further, E. P. Thompson has argued in a series of articles and full-length studies that the activities of English crowds in the eighteenth century indicate an ‘extraordinary deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief’ – a ‘moral economy’ – which legitimised popular action against those who transgressed customary practice. For Thompson the actions of the crowd reveal some of the underlying assumptions of what he terms the ‘plebeian culture’, assumptions which often ran contrary to those of the authorities in a period of economic change. As a corollary of this, he stressed the need to see these actions from the point of view of the participants and to decode the ceremony and symbolism which many of them displayed, rather than to see them solely through the eyes of the authorities.¹¹

As a result, historians have increasingly been making sense of what have often been regarded as aimless incidents. A useful example is the furore which surrounded the introduction of the Gregorian calendar into Great Britain in September 1752 as a result of an Act passed in the previous year. It is still possible to find accounts of this episode which attribute it to the ignorance and folly of the eighteenth-century populace, with such references as the ‘howls of the uninformed mob to “give us back our eleven days’”.¹² In fact, the removal of eleven days from the calendar in September 1752 (the 3rd to 13th) to bring the country into line with the continent excited popular concern not because people thought they were ‘losing’ days, but because the alteration created considerable difficulties over such matters as debts, contracts or other formal agreements which either fell due during the ‘lost’ days or spanned the changeover. A symptom of the confusion and difficulties caused was revealed when the newspapers had to provide complex tables showing how to calculate wages, taking the change into account, and to explain laboriously the legal position in relation to services fixed by the calendar. That the date on which the year began was changed from 25 March to 1 January also served to upset the timing of many annual payments, as well as complicating hirings, rents and apprenticeships. Protest about the ‘lost’ days was not simply a display of irrational ignorance, but one based on concern about interference and complication of many important transactions.¹³ As such it throws some light on contemporary society and can be rendered at least comprehensible by a closer examination of the impact of a particular piece of legislation.

There are obviously dangers here, principally that of investing incidents with too much significance. The sources at our disposal are often inadequate for a completely satisfactory appraisal of the motives and rationale of those who participated in popular disturbances and one of the subtler forms of condescension in historical writing is to see all violence as ‘protest’ and all the participants in riots as sobersided and self-conscious proletarians. A degree of tact and sensitivity is required in dealing with episodes for which the source materials are often limited. The issue is complicated by the sociological perspectives which argue that no social action is meaningless. Even the most casual-looking and seemingly unrestrained brawl might be regarded as having some ‘meaning’ to those involved and subject to certain normative constraints. Recent work on such subjects as football crowds is an example of an attempt to understand the motives of those concerned in events which are sometimes labelled as ‘senseless’.¹⁴ Although studies of this kind arouse controversy, either from those who believe them too naive in their application of anthropological theory or from those who believe that to understand motivation is in some way to condone the events themselves, they nonetheless provide an important parallel to some of the work being done by historians on hitherto obscure or little explored areas of the past.¹⁵

As well as providing historians with a kind of ‘window’ on the attitudes and assumptions of otherwise inaccessible sections of the population, there has been a tendency in recent work to widen the scope of enquiry from a concentration on popular disturbances per se to an examination of social relationships at large. One strand of research has been concerned with the relationship between ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ and the process by which these terms are defined; another has been an exploration of what some sociologists call the ‘negotiation of order’, the processes by which events are defined as ‘disorderly’ or ‘disturbances’ and the way these definitions could alter according to circumstance.¹⁶ The concept of ‘social control’ and the more informal processes by which frequent outbreaks of collective violence are discouraged and contained have also attracted discussion.¹⁷

Studies such as Dr Bailey’s investigation of the differential patterns of law enforcement in relation to popular disturbances in late Victorian England, Dr Storch’s examinations of the use of the professional police as an agency of regulating popular recreations, and Dr Hay’s account of the role of the law in eighteenth-century England illustrate a more sophisticated approach to the question of ‘order’ than one confined solely to the mechanics and technicalities of policing. Within limits, ‘order’ – and by implication ‘disorder’ – are being recognised as elastic terms which vary according to changing social and political attitudes. Historians have increasingly asked what were the pressures and circumstances within society which led to changes in the definition and regulation of conduct.¹⁸ If, however, there is a relative quality in the attitude of the authorities to certain forms of activity, such as strikes, mass petitioning of parliament, and aspects of popular recreation, it is important that the processes which are believed to be at work should be made explicit. One danger of the approach which sees the definition of what is ‘orderly’ or ‘disorderly’ as ‘socially constructed’ is that it can too easily degenerate into a kind of conspiracy theory in which the authorities, the press, the police are seen in a solely manipulative role. These collectives are in their own way just as crude as the ‘mob’. While it may be true that on occasions the law has been manipulated to serve sectional interests and that the definition of ‘order’ can shift to accommodate the purposes of ruling groups, it is important that this does not coarsen our understanding of the complexities and subtleties which govern attitudes and responses to events.

Disturbances, Riots, Crowds, and Mobs

In the context of discussions of public order, the word ‘disturbance’ is normally defined as any interruption of tranquillity by tumult or uproar. Needless to say, such a definition begs many questions and it is important to examine the kinds of definition available for the study of popular disturbances? There are four types of definition available, those provided in law, those derived from the social sciences, those used by contemporaries in the period being studied, and those applied by other historians in their attempt to delimit a discrete area of enquiry.

The law dealing with public order in England covers a wide range of offences. Some breaches of public order have in the past been considered as treason by an extension of the Statute of Edward III which covers levying war on the King. The great majority of such crimes, however, are covered by the common law offences of riot, rout, unlawful assembly and affray. The essential features of these offences was recognised as early as the seventeenth century when Chief Justice Hale provided distinguishing criteria for the different offences which were followed, with minor modifications, by later legal writers, including Blackstone. The basic offence is unlawful assembly, defined as any gathering of three or more persons, on public or private property, with common intent to commit either a lawful or unlawful act in such a way a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations used in references
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The age of riots
• 3. Manifold disorders
• 4. Eighteenth-century London
• 5. Food riots in England
• 6. Labour disputes before the Combination Laws
• 7. The age of revolution
• 8. London in the age of revolution
• 9. London and the kingdom
• 10. Unions and labourers: industrial and agricultural protest
• 11. The reform struggle
• 12. Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index