Douglas Hay & Nicholas Rogers – Eighteenth-Century English Society, Shuttles & Swords
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Douglas Hay & Nicholas Rogers – Eighteenth-Century English Society, Shuttles & Swords
[Oxford University Press 1997] buy new or used at abebooks.co.uk | buy new at amazon.co.uk 
If you use either of these links to purchase this item breviary stuff will receive 5% commission England in the long eighteenth century has often been regarded as a deferential society under aristocratic leadership, or more recently, as a society whose internal tensions were dispersed by the persistant experience of war. This book takes a different view. Drawing together the implications of recent work on demography, labour, and law, it seeks to re-explore the power relations in English society and the ongoing struggles over popular entitlements and elite privilege. Focusing primarily on the experience of England's lower orders, Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers accord new significance to the decline of customary rights and claims, and to the triumph of market forces and the law, showing how the paternalism of the first half of the century gave way to the sharper class articulation of the second, culminating in the birth of a working-class radicalism in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. 'Shuttles', to a squire or great landed patrician, meant trade, manual work, the stain on those who were not, and could never be, gentlemen. To a small master weaver, and his journeymen and apprentices, they were a proud symbol of 'the Trade', a skill and a claim to legal rights, against all those outside it. Swords, the emblems of gentlemanly status, were still commonly worn in the streets of London in the early eighteenth century. But even when fashion made them less common, they remained an essential element of male formal dress among the upper classes, as long as the duel also remained central to the code of honour. In the eyes of the middling sort they were more likely to be either risible, or carry connotations of privilege or even tyranny. The labouring poor, increasingly through the century, and especially at the end of this period, looked up at swords in the hands of mounted soldiers and propertied volunteers as the state turned more to coercion. In 1819 at least eleven men, women, and children died of sabre wounds or were trampled to death when the yeomanry, directed by the magistracy, attacked the mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field, Manchester. Over 400 were wounded at 'Peterloo', many of them maimed for life. The government congratulated the perpetrators. Contents
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