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The Lancashire weavers' riots of April 1826 were one of the most dramatic events in the history of the English cotton industry. Although 1826 was neither the first nor the last occasion on which newly-installed powerlooms were destroyed by angry English textile workers, it was certainly the biggest. For four days, the area bordered by Chorley, Clitheroe, Bacup, and Bury was convulsed as desparate crowds attacked local weaving sheds and smashed over 1100 of the hated machines. The immediate human cost of this brief but spectacular orgy of violence was borne by the six people killed when rioters encountered the military at Chatterton; a further instalment was paid, some months afterwards, by the ten people transported for life, and the thirty others sentenced to prison terms, for their part in the disturbances. The symbolic significance of the 1826 riots — representing vividly the final vain attempt of an old way of life based on the handloom and the domestic workshop to resist by force the 'inevitable march of progress' in the shape of the steam engine and factory — has long been recognised. Yet the exciting story of what happened during these four hectic days has never been told in detail, and the Lancashire loom-breakers have attracted little attention from historians, compared with midland Luddites of 1812 and the 'Swing' rioters in Southern England in 1830. […] Now, at last, we have an exhaustive, hour-by-hour narrative of the four days of rioting, coupled with a detailed account of the fates of some of the rioters, from an enthusiastic local historian who knows the area and its past intimately.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Elephants and Chickens

Monday — The Beginnings

Tuesday — 'A Disposition to Riot'

Wednesday — Watch and Ward

Wednesday — The Chatteron 'Fight'

Wednesday — On Two Fronts

Thursday — 'Along by Botany Bay'

Dispute and Dishonour

The Quiet Which Prevails

'A Melacholy Catalogue'

'Like a Wicked Noah's Ark'

Thomas Emmet — On the Manlius

On the Harmony

A Lucky Break

A Family Story

A New Life

Surely not in Vain

Notes

Dramatis Personae

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Appendix 6

Appendix 7

Select Bibliography

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This pamphlet is a study of resistance. It describes the long drawn out fight of the commoners of Otmoor to defend their rights against enclosure, a fight which lasted for at least fifty years, from 1786, when an enclosure Bill was first mooted, to 1835, when the unity of the resistance broke up. The story of the Otmoor disturbances is already familiar in its broad outlines from the account given by the Hammonds in The Village Labourer. But it is told here by Benard Reaney with a wealth of new documents which make it possible for him to offer important new interpretations, and to place the disturbances in a context of class antagonisms and alignments. The 'possessioning' of September 6, 1830, is shown as part of a well-organised and highly-skilled resistance which in some respects reached a higher point after 1830 than before. Documents in the Oxfordshire Record Office and P.R.O. are drawn upon to show the strategies of resistance, and the pattern of militancy is related to the social structure of Otmoor's seven towns — in partiuclar the idiosyncracies of Charlton-on-Otmoor, 'the focus of all principal discontent', the home of 'the more numerous and daring of the offenders'. A valuable section on the 'break-up of the resistance' discusses the social antagonisms which undermined the popular alliance from within. The study is a critical one, and it is hoped that it may offer useful lessons to those engaged in the still unresolved struggle between property and common rights.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

The Seven Towns of Otmoor

Common Rights

The Enclosers

The 'Possessioning' of September 6, 1830 and the Riot at St Giles's Fair

Resistance Movement, 1830-1835

The Break-up of Resistance

The Serbonian Bog

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. Dr 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 1830s.

Contents

Abbreviations

1. Agrarianism

2. Thomas Spence: Newcastle, 1750-1787

3. Spence in London, 1788-1814

4. Agrarians and Revolutionaries: Spencean Philanthropy, 1814-1820

5. Agrarian Ideals in Radical Politics: The 1820s and 1830s

6. Precepts in Practice

7. Designed for the Support of Mankind

Bibliography

Index

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.

This book opens with an introductory chapter which attempts to explain the context of custom by illustrating that historical continuity was seen as the prinicipal requirement for any kind of collective action to be characterised as 'customary'. Some legal opinion in the eighteenth century strove to undermine the notion of custom and replace it with the certainties of statute law. From this it can be seen that an official culture was often in conflict with unofficial popular morality. Chapter 2 represents an endeavour to reconstruct several local customary calendars for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to show that the efforts of folklorists and others have resulted in the constructon of artificial regional or even national calendars of custom and usage which destroy local specificity. In fact, the local calendar was made up of several different kinds of calendar relating to the range of experience within village life, from work and leisure to parish or manor government. The relationship of one particular group within the community whose role was shaped by customary practice – the church ringers – to the local calendar is also examined.

Chapter 3 examines some aspects of the notion of legitimation and suggest that, in part, the collective action of the labouring poor which took place on certain customary dates until the mid-nineteenth century, was legitimated by reference to church and manor practice, particularly the annual state services which were celebrated in the parish church, and the structure of manorial organisation. Thus, parish perambulations during Rogation Week, Guy Fawkes night celebrations, and Oak Apple Day customs were reinforced. Chapter 4, by concentrating on an examination of harvest practices, considers the socially cohesive nature of custom and assesses its importance for the labouring poor. Chapter 5 illusrates the socially disruptive side of other customs and rituals and relates them to forms of collective action adopted during periods of more overtly politcal social protest, in particular the Captain Swing disturbances.

Wood gatherers whose actions had previously been legitimated by reference to custom found, during the later eighteenth century, that statute law had eroded their right and cast them in the role of wood stealer. Chapter 6 looks at the struggle between custom and law in the context of the poor's belief in a general customary right to collect wood for fuel. Chapter 7 deals with the suppression of many customs in the mid-nineteenth century, and describes the change from village feast to benefit club day (which transformed one of them). This chapter concludes with an account of the deliberate attempt to remodel some customs, such as the harvest home supper, to conform with and promote more acceptable values of sobriety and good order, and to recreate a kind of deferential community orderliness, supposed by some Victorian writers and painters to recall former times.

Contents

Introduction

1 The Context of Custom

Custom and the Past

Custom and Sources

Custom and Perspective

2 The Community and its Calendars

The Reconstruction of Local Calendars

Local Customary Groups: The Case of Church Ringers

3 Custom and Legitimation

The Chruch

The Manor

4 Custom and Social Cohesion

Harvest and Harvest Perquistes

Calendar Rituals and the Shape of the Community

5 The Rituals of Privation and Protest

Custom, Conflict and Commensality

Protest and the Enemies of the Community

6 Crime, Custom, and Popular Legitimacy

7 The Control of Custom

Appendix 1: The Development of Folklore Studies in England

Appendix 2: The Ritual of the Year

General Index

Index of Places

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The study of popular sexual attitudes and behaviour has moved far and fast in recent years, receiving momentum from historical demographers and histrorians of the family. At most times illicit sex was largely a matter for the church courts, although bastardy always posed problems for poor law administration. During the Interregnum statute law took over and placed drastic sanctions, including in some cases the death penalty, in the hands of its courts. Stephen Roberts examines the working of this remarkable act in Devon. He contributes both to our knowledge of how a statute was regarded and enforced in a particular region and to our knowledge of popular sexual attitudes and behaviour.

Avril Leadley focusses on the market place and the people who interest her would probably be regarded as cheats rather than criminals. Properly she draws attention to the central role of the market place, to the problems of its regulation by borough authorities, to the difficulties of government in gaining acceptance for uniform weights and measures and of the sensitivity of a direct action inclined populace to malpractices.

Roger Wells turns his attention to the problem of order. Crime and disturbance in teh eighteenth century took place in a society which lacked a large and professional enough police system for the imposing of prompt and effective control. Serious outbreaks of disorder needed the employment of the military either in its regular or in one of its irregular forms (yeoman, cavalry, volunteer regiments, etc). Concentrating on one of the most disturbed years, 1795, when disaffection at home, threat of invasion from abroad and high food prices seriously concerned the authorities. Dr Wells examines the problems of using the militia for crowd control when, suffering from the same strains as the population from which it was drawn, the loyalty of many of its number was in doubt.

Bob Bushaway brings together his skills as professional historian and student of folklore and customs. This combination shows to advantage in his account of conflict between wood-taking habits of forest populations and a law increasingly reflecting the property concerns of the woodland owners. Here popular attitudes and developing notions of property rights clashed with as much import as in teh most dramatic confrontations characteristic of smuggling, poaching and wrecking.

John Rule use sheep-stealing as a casestudy of rural crime c. 1740 to 1780. All capital offences create documentation but sheep-stealing was sufficiently commonplace to do so to a usable extent. The paper is exploratory: by looking at sheep-stealers it indicates something of the complexity and range of motivations which lay behind the perpetration of criminal acts in the countryside.

Contents

Introduction

Fornication and bastardy in mid-seventeenth century Devon : how was the Act of 1650 enforced?

Stephen Roberts

Some villains of the eighteenth-century market place

Avril D Leadley

The militia mutinies of 1795

Roger Wells

From custom to crime : wood gathering in eigthteenth- and early nineteenth-century England : a focus for conflict in Hampshire, Wiltshire and the south

Robert W Bushaway

The manifold causes of rural crime : sheep-stealing in England c 1740-1840

John G Rule