In Contempt of All Authority, Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660

History

Sharp, Buchanan

Europe

Breviary Stuff Publications

The Hernhill Rising of 1838 was the last battle fought on English soil, the last revolt against the New Poor Law, and England's last millenarian rising. The bloody 'Battle of Bosenden Wood', fought in a corner of rural Kent, was the culmination of a revolt led by the self-styled 'Sir William Courtenay'. It was also, despite the greater fame of the 1830 Swing Riots, the last rising of the agricultural labourers.  Barry Reay provides us with the first comprehensive and scholarly analysis of the abortive rising, its background, and its social context, based on intensive research, particularly in local archives. He presents a unique case-study of popular mobilization in nineteenth-century England, giving us a vivid portrait of the day-to-day existence of the farm labourer and the life of the hamlet. Dr. Reay explores the wider context of agrarian relations, rural reform, protest and control through the fascinating story of The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers.

The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers, Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England

Reay, Senior Lecturer in History Barry

A re-evaluation of the hoary problem of the question of revolution in Britain and Ireland during the allegedly dying years of the Age of Revolution. On the 16 November 1802 a posse of Bow Street Runners raided the Oakley Arms, a working class pub in Lambeth, on the orders of the Home Office. Over thirty men were arrested, among them, and the only one of any social rank, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard. Despard and twelve of his associates were subsequently tried for high treason before a Special Commission, and Despard and six others were executed on 21 February 1803. It was alleged that they had planned to kill the King, seize London and overturn the government and constitution. Until recently this event had been almost entirely neglected by historians, principally on the grounds that it was an isolated occurrence, the brainchild of a disgruntled and probably insane Irishman. The incident is relegated to a footnote in the relevant volume of the Oxford History of England and even then only in support of First Minister Addington's habitual 'calmness'. Apologists speedily claimed that Despard was just another dupe of the supposedly notorious hoard of informers and agents-provocateurs employed by the younger Pitt and his supposed lackey, Addington, to support their outrageous assault on the constitutional freedoms and rights of Englishmen. One pamphlet attacking the revelations of the infamous Oliver the Spy, typically claimed that in 1817 Oliver was 'by no means a novice in matters of treason, but ... was closely and deeply implicated in the mad schemes of Colonel Despard'. These views, that any insurrectionary activity manifested by Englishmen was either the product of insane individuals or the manipulations of secret-service agents, or both, rather than an indigenous phenomenon, were also adopted by Whig and Fabian historians. The first coherent reappraisal of the Despard affair was provided by E. P. Thompson, in his magnificent work, The Making of the English Working Class. An integral part of Thompson's thesis hinges on his analysis of what happened to one seminal political development in the 1790s, namely the first primarily English working-class movement for democracy. E. P. Thompson's claim that determined physical force revolutionary groupings originated after the suppression of the Popular Democratic Movement in 1795 has been seriously challenged by conventional British historians. This book offers a reinterpretation of Thompson's evidence, through a detailed overall study of post-1795 British politics. It throws new light on the organisation of government intelligence sources, Pitt's repressive policies and machinery, and oscillating popular responses; all developments, including recrudescences of the open Democratic Movement, and notably the emergence of insurrectionary conspiracies, are firmly related to both events in the critical Irish theatre, and the course of the war against France.

Insurrection: The British Experience 1795-1803

Wells, Roger

In 1798, the Rev. T. R. Malthus published his explosive thesis arguing that population had a natural tendency to expand with the capacity of any society to feed itself. The most strident component of the Malthusian cased turned on the 'positive check' to demographic growth, a subsistence crisis generating malnutrition-induced disease and starvation, and thereby inflicting a marked drop in population. Malthus's argument was based on historical experience, but his vision was conditioned by, and conceived in, a late eighteenth-century context. Historians, while acknowledging that Tudor and Stuart precedents, and contemporary experience in continental Europe, and even in colonial Ireland, could be marshalled in support of Malthus's position at that time, have ignored any consideration of why an English country clergyman, should have developed such a pessimistic theory. English historians unthinkably, and automatically, take an implied refuge in the optimistic view that English capitalism had, through industrialisation and an agricultural revolution, achieved a 'maturity' enabling the country to escape incarceration in a 'pre-industrial' vicious circle, turning on a fragile agrarian-based economic environment. This book reverts Malthus in a thoroughly English context. It proves that famine could, and did, occur in England during the classic period of the Industrial Revolution. The key economic determinant proved to be the ideologically-inspired war, orchestrated by the Prime Minister, the younger Pitt, against the French and their attempted export of revolutionary principles at bayonet point, to the rest of Europe. This international context, in part, conditioned the recurrent development of famine conditions in England in 1794-6 and again in 1799-1801. Here the multiple ramifications of famine in this country, as it lurched from crisis to crisis in wartime, are explored in considerable depth. These were repeated crises of capitalism, juxtaposed with the autocratic and aristocratic state's total commitment to war, which contrived to challenge not just the commitment to war, but both the equilibrium and the survival of the state itself. 'WANT' stalked the land; intense rioting periodically erupted; radical politicisation, notably of unenfranchised working people, proceeded apace, in part stimulated by the catastrophic events projected on the world stage by the process of the French Revolution. The book finally explains how such an oligarchic, unrepresentative government managed through determined economic interventionism, manipulation of the unique English social security system, and final resort to army rule, to preserve itself and the political structure during a key epoch within the Age of Revolutions.

Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1793-1801

This book traces the development of agrarian ideas from the 1770s through to Chartism, and seeks to explain why, in an era of industrialization and urban growth, land remained one of the major issues in popular politics. Malcolm Chase considers the relationship between 'land consciousness' and early socialism; attempts to create alternative communities; and contemporary perceptions of nature and the environment. He concludes that, far from being an anachronistic, utopian, and reactionary movement, agrarianism was an integral part of the working class experience and of radical politics. The People's Farm also provides the most extensive study to date of Thomas Spence, and his followers the Spenceans. New light is thrown on the Spa Fields and Cato Street conspiracies, in which they were involved; but their true significance lies in their contribution to English radicalism - a key factor in shaping the politics of agrarian reform in the 1820s and 1840s.

The People's Farm, English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840

Business & Money

Chase, Professor Malcolm

Real Estate

Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E. P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea for the English folk materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the period from which most evidence survives. Bringing together a wealth of research, this book explores the view that such rural folk practices were a mechanism of social cohesion, and social disruption. Through them the interdependence of the rural working-class and the gentry was affirmed, and infringements of the rights of the poor resisted, sometimes aggressively. By Rite represents the results of detailed research in a wide range of sources, including the local Press, Antiquarian and Field Studies papers, county journals, local collections and archives throughout England and Wales.

By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880 (Studies in Popular Culture (Paperback))

Bushaway, Bob

Warren James and the Dean Forest Riots: The Disturbances of 1831

ANSTIS, Ralph

In the early 19th century, Henry Hunt became one of the most stirring orators of English Radicalism. His speech following the "Peterloo" massacre cost him three years in prison and gave him a reputation for inciting the rabble to violence. This book considers his place in the radical movement. This first full-scale biography finally brings to light Hunt's vital role in molding the English working-class into an effective political force. Converted to the reform cause during the wars against Napoleonic France, Hunt gave popular radicalism a distinctly working-class perspective that countered the contemporary belief in a laissez-faire political economy. Hero of the unrepresented and repressed, scourge of the moderate reformers and gradualists, Hunt set the standard for the Chartist challenge. This work, based on a wide range of primary sources, reassesses Hunt's influential career and illuminates a formative period in the development of radical politics in England.

'Orator' Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working Class Radicalism

Biographies & Memoirs

Belchem, Emeritus Professor of History John

Historical

In the first elections called under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act the Tory party appeared doomed. They had recorded their worst set of results in living memory and were organizationally in disarray as well, importantly, seemingly completely out of touch with the current political mood. During the intense pressure brought to bear by the supporters of political reform was the use of "pressure from without" and in this tactic the industrial working class were highly visible. Calls for political reform had been growing since the 1760s and given fresh impetus with the revolutions in America and France respectively. The old Tory party had been resistent to all but the most the most glaring corruption and abuse under the pre-Reform system, not least to the idea of extending the electoral franchise to the 'swineish multitude', as Edmund Burke notoriously described the working class. Yet within five years after the passing of reform the Conservatives - the natural heirs to the old Tory party - were attempting to politically incorporate sections of the working class into their ranks. This book examines how this process of making these 'Angels in Marble', to use Disraeli's phrase from a later era, took shape in the 1830s. It focuses on how a section of the industrial working class became the target of organizational inclusion into Peelite Conservatism and ultimately into the British party political system.

Making Angels in Marble: The Conservatives, the Early Industrial Working Class and Attempts at Political Incorporation

Walsh, David

Economics

Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Studies in Labour History)

Business Culture

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