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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

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A Chinese woman pushes her way to the front of a hiring queue outside a factory in Shenzhen…. A Bolivian miner, without light or ventilation, crawls deep inside a deserted mine… A group of Somali cleaners files into an investment bank in London’s Canary Wharf…

Globalisation has created a whole new working class – and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s to its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s. Along the way he provides a ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ for the anti-globalisation movement, uncovering startling parallels between the issues that confronted the original anti-capitalists and those who have taken to the streets in Seattle, Genoa and beyond.

Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today’s front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London’s Docklands – and how they’re being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot.

The stories come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals: child labourers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in America’s wild west, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War One. It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

Contents

Introduction

1. Rise like lions

The Peterloo Massacre, Manchester 1819
Shenzhen, China, 2003
Manchester, 1819

2. Everything connected with beauty

The silk weavers' revolt, Lyon, 1831
Varanasi, India, 2005
Lyon, France, 1830

3. This is the dawn…

The Paris Commune, 1871
Amukoko, Nigeria, 2005
Paris, April 1867

4. Every race worth saving

How American workers invented May Day
Basra, Iraq, 2006
Philadelphia, USA, 1869

5. A great big union grand

Unskilled unionism goes global, 1889-1912
Canary Wharf, London, 2004
London, 1889

6. Wars between brothers

How German workers tried to stop the war
Huanuni, Bolivia, 2006
Germany, 1905

7. Totally ignorant labourers

The birth of the Chinese working class
New Delhi, India, 2005
Shanghai, China, 1919

8. Heaven and earth will hear us

Jewish workers fight for cultural freedom
El Alto, Boliva, 2006
Brzeziny, Poland

9. Joy brought on by hope

When workers controlled the factories
Neuquén, Argentina, 2006
Italy, 1920
France, 1936
Flint, Michigan, 1937

Afterword: Louise Michel with fairy wings

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

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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

Preface

1. Landscapes and Perspectives

2. Hierarchy

3. The Politics of Love and Marriage

4. Political Order

5. Harvests and Dearth

6. Custom

7. The Disruption of Custom, the Triumph of Law

8. New Populations

9. The Power of the People

10. War and Peace

11. Popular Beliefs and Popular Politics

12. Class and Power in Hanoverian England

Notes

Chronology

Figures

Select Bibliography

Index

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This volume brings together a wide-ranging and seminal debate about the nature of English rural society in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries. Previously published in The Journal of Peasant Studies, the contributions challenge many of the existing premises of rural historiography. Together with major new contributions by the editors, the collection will be essential reading for all interested in rural England in modern times.

Contents

1. Class and Conflict in Rural England: Some reflections on a Debate

Mick Reed

2. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850

Roger Wells

3. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850: A Comment

Andrew Charlesworth

4. Social Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside in the Early Nineteenth-Century: A Rejoinder

Roger Wells

5. The Wells-Charlesworth Debate: A Personal Comment on Arson in Norfolk and Suffolk

J. E. Archer

6. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: The Use of the Open-Closed Village Model

Dennis Mills and Brian Short

7. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: A Comment

Mick Reed

8. Peasants and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Rural England: A Comment on Two Recent Articles

Dennis Mills

9. Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness in the English Countryside, 1700-1880

Roger Wells

10. An Agenda for Modern English Rural History?

Mick Reed and Roger Wells

Consolidated Bibliography

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Customs in Common is a companion volume to The Making of the English Working Class. It explores the ebullient and contradictory plebian culture which preceded the formation of the working class institutions and consciousness, and its customs and practices, some of which survived well into Victorian times.

Although rooted in English evidence from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these studies have wide-ranging reference and significance. The notion of 'the moral economy', which Tompson first developed to analyse the motives of food rioters, has subsequently become influential in many fields, including peasant studies. Thompson takes up the discussion again, replies to some criticisms and extensions of his work and welcomes others. He shows how careful attention to fragmentary evidence enables one to decode some practices, such as the sale of wives, or shaming rituals like rough music, with their forgotten vocabulary of symbolism. In examining the rigorous presence of women in food riots from the sixteenth century onwards, he suggests the light which this throws on gender relations.

In a study which confronts the triumphalism of much recent history of the agricultural revolution, Thompson re-examines the ways in which villagers lost their common-rights in the face of the law's hostility to custom. Some historians have written of the riotous plebs of eighteenth century England and Wales as if they were only a problem for magistrates and governments to handle. For Thompson, the rulers, landowners and governments were a problem for the people to handle. Perhaps this is why the pages come alive for us. Using an unusually wide range of sources—legal records, folklore collections, academic studies, local record office collections, contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, sermons and poems—Thompson has once again given voices to the silent majority.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

I Introduction: Custom and Culture

II The Patricians and the Plebs

III Custom, Law and Common Right

IV The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century

V The Moral Economy Reviewed

VI Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism

VII The Sale of Wives

VIII Rough Music

Index

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Historians of protest have attempted to unlock the meaning of social unrest, studying collective violence and action as a barometer of social and political stability. John E. Archer examines the diversity of protest from 1780 to 1840 and how it altered during this period of extreme change. This textbook covers all forms of protest, including the Gordon Riots of 1780, food riots, Luddism, the radical political reform movement and Peterloo in 1819, and the less well researched anti-enclosure, anti-New Poor Law riots, arson and other forms of 'terroristic' action, up to the advent of Chartism in the 1830s. Archer evaluates the problematic nature of source materials and conflicting interpretations leading to debate, and reviews the historiography and methodology of protest studies.

'The Burning & Plundering of Newgate & Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob'

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Historiography, sources and methods

Sources, problems and methodologies

2. Agricultural Protest

Enclosures and lost rights

Collective disturbances

Post-1830

Anti-New Poor Law protest

3. Food Riots

Timing and location of food riots

The food rioter

The form of the food riot

The 'moral economy'

4. Industrial Protest

Pre-Luddite protest

Luddism

5. Political Protest

The reactionary crowd

Reformist and insurrectionary traditions

The reform movement

Post-1832

6. Policing Protest

Law Enforcement

The 'new' police

The law

7. A Revolutionary Challenge?

8. Conclusion

Bibliography

Index