Rogues, Thieves And the Rule of Law

The Problem Of Law Enforcement In North-East England, 1718-1820

Gwenda Morgan, Peter Rushton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781857281163
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135370312
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law" is a large-scale study of crime, disorder and law enforcement in northern England in the early modern period. London was not the only city where female criminals were common and gangs were feared, nor was it the sole centre of industrial and political agitation. The north was an area of national significance which supplied the capital with its fuel and whose tendency to industrial insurgence commanded the attention of every 18th-century administration.; Arguing that much of the recent work on early modern crime has focused on London and its surrounding counties, which have wrongly been interpreted as typical of the whole country, this study, in contrast, seeks to place the metropolitan image within the wider context of regional realities. As such, it offers a significant antidote to the picture of excessive brutality associated with London and Tyburn, breaking new ground by encompassing crime in an entire region and at all levels of the judicial system. It uniquely reflects upon gender and crime, the development of transportation, the rise of imprisonment and the convergence of military and civil power, in an attempt to contain an assertive and riotous population in a region remote from central authority.; The north-east had a distinctively violent history before 1700 and retained some of its traditionally wild character in the 18th century. The growing contrasts between urban and rural districts provide a revealing backdrop to the different patterns of crime and official responses. In terms of punishments, the region swiftly followed national trends in transportation, but was pioneering in its early use of imprisonment. This study seeks to change the way we think about crime in early modern England.

CHAPTER ONE
The character of north-east England

The region and its people

The North-East appeared remote and alien to people from the rest of England. For one thing, in the eighteenth century the region had only recently emerged from the Border lawlessness which had characterized it for centuries. Some picaresque accounts of eighteenth-century characters such as the famous piper James Allan suggest that this image remained both powerful and attractive. His wandering, musically creative, intermit-tently criminal, life was dramatized after his death in 1810 (in Durham gaol) by accounts which stressed the casual subculture of the marginal economy of the Borders, with a pattern of individual employment drifting in and out of crime. If even half the story is true, Allan was remarkably lucky to have respectable patrons who rescued him from transportation or even the gallows.¹ The problem of evaluating the myth of the wild, lawless and mobile Border people forms an enduring difficulty when confronting contemporary accounts of local north-eastern crimes (see Ch. 4), but it is important to note that locals as well as outsiders were attracted to the image. A second aspect of the North-East’s reputation was simply its geographic location: it is close, perhaps too close, to Scotland. Culturally, in matters of language and religion in particular, north-east England resembled Lowland Scotland more than southern England. Some villages on the English side of the border contained more Presbyterians than Anglicans, as Bishop Chandler’s survey in 1736 demonstrated, and the local dialect was notably more like Scots than English. In other aspects, too, though visitors would have been surprised to know it, north-easterners were closer to their Scottish neighbours: for example, in their literacy rates which were markedly higher than elsewhere in England.² This may have been the by-product of a much more observable feature which had attracted attention in the seventeenth century, namely the migration of numerous Scots to the industries of the river valleys of the Tyne and Wear. In the early part of this process, Scottish birth had been a matter of opprobrium. Before 1700, in theory at least, no one born in Scotland could be apprenticed to a trade in Newcastle’s guilds, though evidence suggests that many made a successful entry. Scottishness was used in insults to derogate a person’s character, and, in the early seventeenth century, to allege that someone was a “Scots Runagate Rogue and Vagabond and that no bodie knew from whence he came” would be to invite a slander suit in the church courts. In the Civil War period, it was noted that there were hundreds of Scots, all allegedly fierce Covenanters, in Newcastle. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, Scottish birth was a common feature south of the border, among both rich and poor alike, and was reported without comment. Keelmen, criminals, craftsmen, ministers, and doctors could all have a Scottish connection. The consequence is that, when Scots were condemned or executed in the North-East in the eighteenth century, there were no attributions of criminality to nationality, for it was too common a feature of all social classes.³

For reasons of history and myth, therefore, the North-East did not have a good reputation with regard to either its landscape or its people: most visitors expected both to be strange, wild and dangerous. “Southern consciousness of an alien North” had a long history, going back at least to the fifteenth century, and eighteenth-century views were still shaped by this notion of “northernness”.⁴ Spencer Cowper, leaving his beloved Kent in 1746 to become Dean at Durham Cathedral, was surprised to find that the countryside was not “wild, heathy country” but well cultivated. The Durham landscape was perhaps the most attractive that visitors encountered. Wesley thought that the road from Durham City to Sunderland passed through “a lovely country”. An American visitor in the 1770s, Jabez Maud Fisher, agreed, viewing Durham as “a country which I can never behold without Delight”. In his view, “The County of Durham is in general rich and highly cultivated, a Succession of Hills and Vallies but no mountains, a great number of Country Seats, Villages and fine Views.” More systematic surveys of the agricultural quality of the region contrasted the fertile plains along the coast or in the river valleys with the rough uplands. There were contrasts in the social relations in farming, too, for

Northumberland continued using living-in farm servants long after southern counties had abandoned the custom, and these were often hired as entire families or, at least, in a group containing a man and a woman, employed together and given a cottage to live in. As the commentator on the Board of Agriculture reports at the end of the eighteenth century remarked:

The following particulars relating to the Northumbrian peasantry, will afford matter of amusement, if not of astonishment, to English farmers. The practice of Northumberland is, doubtlessly, a relick of the vassal system, which still prevails in the more northern part of Europe, where farm laborers belong to the land; make part of the live stocks of the farm.

In addition, it seemed to outsiders, the apparent system of payment, in food and coals, and the right to run some stock of sheep and cattle on the land, reaffirmed this quaint appearance of feudalism, though it was well suited to both the labourers, hired for a year and able to rear large numbers of sheep in addition to earning wages, and the farmers, who had a secure workforce. Moreover, the pull of industrial employment meant that agricultural wages were generally higher than elsewhere.⁵

While the landscape had its redeeming features, the towns made an overwhelmingly poor impression. Cowper was not gratified to have his arrival in Durham impeded by great crowds of curious onlookers anxious to see the new Dean, and viewed the town itself as “very nasty and disagreeable, the streets narrow and wretchedly paved, and the houses dirty and black, as if they had no inhabitants but colliers.”⁶ Others recognized that the place was a centre of power, both ecclesiastical and civil, and saw in the handful of good town houses the residences of those who had influence. Both before the Civil War and 80 years later, when Daniel Defoe passed through, visitors were impressed by Durham’s striking physical appearance, almost surrounded by the sweep of the River Wear. In their “fine houses” the clergy lived “in all magnificence and splendour imaginable”, remarked Defoe. As Fisher summed up his impressions of Durham, “the Streets are very narrow, dirty and irregular, the houses are low mean and old but the Situation fully compensates for these Disadvantages”⁷. The other major regional centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, provided similar contrasting impressions. The geographic location on the northern side of a river cutting deep between wide cliffs, always seemed to provide a dramatic view of the whole industrial area. Moreover, it was probably the largest purely industrial town in the country, with more than half its men in industrial occupations. Defoe, acknowledging the importance of coal to the South-East, and to London in particular, described the town as “spacious, extended, infinitely populous”, reflecting its vital role in the national economy. Cowper, by contrast, disliked the town at first, appalled by its appearance—“so filthy, so dirty and disagreeable place I never saw”—but at a second visit was forced to concede that the recently rebuilt areas were an improvement:

Our execrations on the filthiness of the place, which before had engaged us so loud that all the street might have heard us, was of force changed into Compliments on the beauty and airyness of Pilgrim Street and the magnificance of the River Tyne.⁸

Yet his overwhelming impression of dirt formed the dominant tone of his reactions to other towns in the region, such as Sunderland, “a large filthy Town, inhabited by more filthy people”. Others agreed, Defoe calling Chester-le-Street, which he passed through from Durham to Newcastle, “an old, dirty, thoroughfare town”, and in the 1790s Frederick Eden noted that South Shields, despite being an opulent sea port, was dirty and had poor, ill-built houses.⁹ The small towns straddling the main roads through rural Northumberland seemed even less impressive: visitors noted the unpaved streets, the thatched roofs and meagre amenities. Places such as Rothbury or Wooler impressed only by their poverty and squalor. Even locals agreed: Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, living at Wallsend, described Newcastle in the 1750s as “like the ways of thrift; it is narrow dark and dirty. Some of the streets so steep one is forced to put a dragchain on the wheels.”¹⁰

The people were similarly paradoxical. The gentry seemed to live in fine houses in magnificent country, a fitting object for contemporary admiration and the source material for modern historical study of the creation and perpetuation of aristocratic lifestyles.¹¹ The working people were more problematic. Defoe was perhaps alone in arriving in the region with a view prejudiced in their favour, having some sympathy for the plight of the keelman, on which he had written some years earlier. He was critical of class divisions in Newcastle, reflected in the reaction of the town’s elite to the foundation of the Keelman’s Hospital, which, receiving “discouragements from those who ought rather to have assisted so good a work, might have been a noble provision for that numerous and laborious people.”¹² Cowper regarded the people as physically filthy but made few comments on their characters, not even briefly, when the danger of riots arose. Other visitors noted that rapid urban growth was producing some problems of control. An anonymous military commentator, surveying Sunderland’s defences at the end of the century, observed:

The people totally unregulated and almost without police, but they are not therefore so morally bad as might be expected, the place having encreased so fast and sprung up like a mushroom, and not by the usual way of growth, in short, by being left at liberty, forms a curious example of the very few rules and regulations necessary in Society. If they have lost the benefits, they have escaped the evils of much regulation… Though they encreased and became rich they are hardly to be considered as advanced, and equally unfit for a state of war, as for the progress of improvement.¹³

Yet in fact Sunderland was remarkable for the continual improvements throughout the eighteenth century, for without the substantial investment in narrowing the straggling river, and deepening both channel and harbour, there would have been no prosperity. As another visitor, Bishop Richard Pococke, noticed in the 1750s:

They are at great expense in improving the harbour. They have large decked boats on which women throw up all the earth and gravel they can get up, and then the boat is taken out, and ’tis shovelled into the water.

This incidental observation is one the few comments on women’s urban employment, significantly without any critical edge. There was apparently no tradition of employing women in mining, but, as one of Newcastle’s early-nineteenth-century historians remarked:

The singular practice of engaging women as labourers to bricklayers and slaters impresses strangers with an unfavourable and erroneous idea of the delicacy of the inhabitants. As the gentlemen seem not to have sufficient gallantry to reform this abuse, we hope the ladies will exert themselves successfully in abolishing a custom so disgaceful to the town, and in providing employment more suitable and becoming for those poor girls than of mounting high ladders, and crawling over the tops of houses.

Like other commentators at the time, he was relieved that conventional industry, with its early employment of the very young as well as of women, had not spread widely into the region. Where it had, employers were anxiously requested to look to the morals of their workforce as much as their efficiency.¹⁴

Some newly arrived clergymen deliberately set about reforming the people. John Tomlinson, curate to his uncle (of the same name) in Rothbury, on the edge of the Cheviots, recorded that local people had at the end of the seventeenth century displayed little propriety in their behaviour:

This parish when uncle first came was very rude and degenerate —would come into church and ne’er move their hats till just at the reading desk—and then sitt all the time etc.—he applied to three or four of the best, and instructed them when to sitt, stand and kneel, and then bid the vulgar mind them.

In his own time there, in 1717, two men who attempted to rape a woman were addressed in one of his uncle’s sermons about their sin: they, and the rest of the audience, were surprised to discover it was a hanging offence.¹⁵ Other clergy tried to curb violent, but less criminal, habits. In Stockton and Newcastle it was the custom in the first half of the eighteenth century on Shrove Tuesday to tether a cock to a post and stone it to death: William Hogarth portrayed this practice as part of his series The Stages of Cruelty. The custom seems to have been a continuation of cockfighting on that day, once common among schoolboys. A vicar, newly arrived in 1742 in Stockton, managed to abolish the “cock-throwing”, and in the 1770s John Brand noted that this “barbarous custom…an amusement fit only for the bloodiest savages, and not for humanized men, much less for Christians!” had died out in Newcastle. But the disapproval of the respectable failed to have any impact on the popular sports of cockfighting and bull-baiting. Only in the 1790s, when sensibilities had changed and, significantly, the town authorities were persuaded to take action, were public bullrings demolished; in Stockton there were several incidents of injury to the public as bulls escaped from the ring into the market place and surrounding streets. Cockfighting continued well into the nineteenth century, as Brand noted: “a favourite sport of the colliers in the North; the clamorous wants of their families solicit them to go to Work in vain, when a match is heard of”.¹⁶ It remained a well-reported item in the local press throughout the period. The clergy themselves, mostly from the northern region, and increasingly well educated, however, were not entirely beyond reproach. The Reverend Richard Parker, vicar at different times of Ponteland and Embleton in the early eighteenth century, was known as “Drunken Davy”, and provided the church authorities with continual disciplinary problems.¹⁷

The region was not all bad: John Wesley could count on a welcome at many churches, Sunderland's among them, and found his open-air preaching at Newcastle’s Sandhill, or on Gateshead Fell, well received by poor keelmen and colliers. Indeed, his only lifelessly unresponsive audience seems to have been in Durham City.¹⁸ Others believed the reputation for riot and deviance, and found local people beyond conversion. Samuel Bentham, struggling to run a Russian shipyard with local serfs and Tyneside workers, found the latter utterly intractable: “the Newcastle mob—hirelings from that rabble town”. Yet, as Defoe had earlier remarked, “they build ships here to perfection”.¹⁹ Were north-easterners beyond any normal constraint? Certainly rebellion and riot were the main substance of reports from the North-East in the London press, but in both the 1715 and the 1745 risings most of the region, apart from some of the Catholic gentry in Northumberland, had been conspicuously loyal. Durham, under the leadership of its bishop, was always reliable in such circumstances, and Newcastle and Berwick provided the main centres of military concentration, as well as the means of importing foreign troops to secure the eastern side of the country during Bonnie Prince Charlie’s progress south. As to riot and general lawlessness, close scrutiny of local community records does not suggest that the coal trade had engendered an entirely distinct subculture with its own values. Certainly some occupational groups possessed distinctive identities, and perhaps dressed differently: the best-known were the men from Crowley's ironworks— “Crowley’s Crew”—whose paternalist employers demanded strict adherence to rules of attendance and used the sound of a bell to regulate working (and sleeping) times. In Ryton and Winlaton, the poor often had to wear a badge reading “Crowley’s Poor”. There was considerable tension between these men and others on the south side of the Tyne, notably in Gateshead, and a kind of industrial gang culture seems to have been created unintentionally by this industrial village. In part it may have originated because Crowley recruited from outside the region, notably from the Midlands.²⁰ Yet the description of a separate society, beyond normal control, seems to date from very self-interested evangelical efforts in the mid-eighteenth century, and it was among the colliers and keelmen that this seems to have been most applicable. “Crowley’s Crew”, by contrast, were far too much under their employer’s influence. In part, the nature of mining work produced a distinctive appearance, and by its pattern of mutual dependence and self-regulated skill in facing the hazards of working underground, generated a community feeling among the pitmen. By 1750 it seems that not only were miners of characteristic appearance; they had also acquired a reputation for possessing a distinctive culture.²¹ Their character, as revealed by Levine’s & Wrightson’s study of Whickham, however, was not entirely different from other labouring people of the time. Surprisingly, for a village that was one of England’s first proletarian industrial communities, Whickham was in its family life and moral problems rather unremarkable: the petty disorders presented to courts, for example, were typical of the seventeenth century, “conventional enough” to suggest that in their everyday life coal communities were not unusual. Yet by 1700 pitmen had developed an antagonistic industrial culture to match that of the keelmen of the northeast rivers, with powerful rituals of solidarity such as spitting on a stone as an oath of loyalty to the collective purpose of industrial action. They had become members of a “regional community of skill”.²² Probably visitors arrived in the North-East expecting trouble to be visible, confirmation of a widespread stere...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• List of Tables
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Character of North-East England
• Chapter Two: Enforcing the Law
• Chapter Three: The Patterns of Crimes and Punishments
• Chapter Four: The Social Organization of Crime
• Chapter Five: Common and Unnatural Crimes: Women and North-East Crime
• Chapter Six: Learning Their Lesson: The Use of Public Punishments
• Chapter Seven: Transportation
• Chapter Eight: Correction and Imprisonment
• Chapter Nine: Law and Disorder
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Manuscript Sources
• Bibliography